SolarWinds today announced their release of Server and Application Monitor v5.0 as well as reviewed a few of their recent acquisitions as well as new in house platforms and how they fit into their current portfolio.
DameWare
Acquired in December, 2011. With a current user base of over 100,000, they felt it was a appropriate place to jump into the single sysadmin remote support tool space. v8 will be coming out ‘soon’ and add features such as chat and capture screenshots to the already fairly extensive feature set. I’m an heavy DameWare user and am glad to see their dedication to development of this product.
EminentWare
Acquired in Feb 2012. EminentWare WSUS Extension Pack will become SolarWinds Patch Manager. The base product will include a limited set of 3rd party applications as maintenance on the platform – Mozilla, Apple, Java, Adobe, etc. Their goal is to get the price down to “couple bucks” a node to make it affordable to any size shop.
Synthetic End User Monitor
This suite monitors web applications in which you perform quick recording of sequence of web page walk throughs and the application will run through steps, giving alerts if any steps are slow or don’t work. New to the feature set is their Cloud Player Portal which can be deployed into an Amazon EC2 instance directly from the product itself. This gives admins the ability to monitor sites from all over world and is priced per transaction, which has a pretty encompassing definition (can be a login to site, complete action = 1 transaction, etc.). With Amazon’s recent drastic price reduction, this could be a pretty affordable, flexible and valuable option.
The big news, though, is their release of Server & Application Monitor (SAM) v 5.0, formerly Application Performance Monitor (press release below). The new name is to reflect the more extensive reach of the application and what its capabilities are focused on – from just application monitoring to now including real-time hardware health, operating system and application health and performance.