SolarWinds, an IT management software company based in Austin, Texas, updated two of its core products to enhance its performance monitoring capabilities in physical, virtual, and hybrid environments.

The company released new updates of both its storage resource monitor (SRM), adding support for certain all-flash arrays, and its server and application monitor (SAM), adding application dependency mapping to deepen its visibility into interactions between network components.

Both products are part of SolarWinds' IT monitoring platform, Orion. The company’s VP of Product Strategy and Management Ross Fujii referred to this model and SolarWinds’ products as “very modular, yet meshed.” He said this enables a company to install the products that serve their desired use cases, meaning that the products stand alone. Yet, as a company installs more products, they will integrate together under the commonalities of Orion’s services and policies.

Version 6.6 of SolarWinds’ SRM added support for HPE Nimble Storage, Dell EMC Unity, Infinidat InfiniBox, and IBM AIX FlashSystem 9000 all-flash arrays.

The added support solves “pain points around the storage,” said Fujii. “It solves use cases around storage performance, storage capacity, and storage hardware health.”

He said many companies are replacing legacy arrays with the all-flash arrays. The new monitoring and visibility capabilities of the SRM, which runs on the array itself, gives companies visibility through the entire storage stack. It shows performance and capacity at every level and backs up hardware health. This includes performance of individual discs, IOPS, latency, idle hot-spots, and storage chassis. “We give administrators essentially a heads up on many of these hardware-type failures,” said Fujii.

Version 6.6 of SolarWinds’ SAM adds application dependency functionality, which enables users to automatically discover network-based relationships between applications and servers. It monitors performance and visualizes server and network metrics of application connections within any environment. The updates allows companies to collect and visualize data on metrics of packet loss, latency, and network status.

“What we give you is essentially products and capabilities that give you the ability to pinpoint essentially the needle in the haystack of why a problem is happening,” said Fujii.