At Tech Field Day 7, SolarWinds introduced its distinctive approach to IT management, contrasting it with traditional enterprise vendors like HP and IBM. VP of Products, Daniel O’Connor, emphasized SolarWinds’ focus on the mid-market and its bottom-up, user-centric development model, where products are tested and purchased directly by IT managers rather than being sold top-down to executives. This user-focused strategy necessitates software that is easy to use, install, and delivers value immediately without relying on professional services or heavy sales support. The company engages an active community called THWACK to solicit direct feedback, which heavily influences product design and functionality. This has resulted in a portfolio of over 20 commercial and several free tools, which collectively address the needs of network engineers, system administrators, and other IT professionals.
Expanding beyond its traditional network management roots, SolarWinds showcased several product acquisitions and updates that signal a broader IT management focus. These include Log & Event Manager (formerly Trigeo), designed for affordable and straightforward security information and event management (SIEM), and Virtualization Manager (from the Hyper9 acquisition), which visualizes and optimizes virtualized environments. The demo of Log & Event Manager highlighted its out-of-the-box effectiveness, drag-and-drop rule creation, and ease of exploration via word clouds and visual event correlation. The Virtualization Manager demonstrated resource usage dashboards tailored by role, support for capacity planning, visual topology mapping, cost comparisons to Amazon EC2, and potential for chargeback and showback use cases in private cloud environments.
The presentation concluded with more technical discussions about the integration between Virtualization Manager and SolarWinds Storage Manager, as well as a deep dive into Storage Manager’s performance and capacity tracking capabilities. SolarWinds emphasized plans for greater interoperability between their products through a federated architecture that avoids a monolithic system yet facilitates seamless insights across tools. This approach prioritizes modular deployment, low complexity, and actionable data. The overall SolarWinds strategy showcased at Tech Field Day 7 reinforced its aim to simplify IT management while remaining deeply responsive to the real-world challenges and workflows of IT professionals.
Personnel: Brian Radovich, Daniel O'Connor, Joel Dolisy
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