Active Directory is central to identity and access management capabilities — top of mind for IT teams and organisations trying to efficiently and effectively achieve more and meet digital transformation goals.
Then there’s DNS Server, which requires ongoing monitoring to ensure overall health of services and performance.
Both can be better managed and monitored with SolarWinds (SWI) even in hybrid cloud environments — as QBS product manager for SolarWinds James Robotham, SWI ‘head geek’ Sascha Giese, and Loop1’s CEO Bill Fitzpatrick explain in a new webcast, which you can watch in full here.
SolarWinds partnerships represent a strong differentiator for channel partners, especially alongside QBS support.
“DNS Server is obviously critical for your network engineers, supporters and advocates, but often run by separate siloes set by the application and Microsoft specialists within the business,” Robotham says.
“SWI becomes a great stepping stone into another silo, to have a conversation with the business that allows the channel to be both ‘stickier’ and more attentive to customer needs.”
SWI’s Giese underlines that SWI has become “so much more” than a networking company.
“Keep in mind that each IT department consists of various teams and the network is just a small part of this. We all know situations where maybe Outlook or something is a little slow and everyone is blaming the network,” he says.
Experienced network administrators know that many challenges may ultimately be traced to DNS. Yet network teams, application teams, cloud architects and so on may operate in separate siloes.
“So it is usually beneficial to have a tool like SolarWinds, like a single source-of-truth tool that brings all the groups together,” Giese says.
“They then have access to the same set of data. They see the same resources, and we have a couple of features which will point the user within those to the root cause of an issue.”
Loop1’s Fitzpatrick agrees, adding that different teams can all be relying on different toolsets as well — something that can represent an issue in itself.
“The direction that SolarWinds has taken, for years now going back to the creation of apps, is powering a phase of cross-domain intelligence, the ability for teams to work together because the tool leads the way,” he says.
Easy troubleshooting of Active Directory
Of course, the buck doesn’t stop with DNS alone. Active Directory, for instance, might be commonplace but the challenges it can represent are anything but.
With SWI, a template-driven application management system can help streamline and simplify monitoring and management of Active Directory — which might be easy to deploy but can be tricky to troubleshoot.
If you’re working with a systems team as a reseller, they’re going to care about the health of all of the provided domain controllers roles, for example.
“What we can often see [with the SWI toolset] is all the dependencies of whatever element we’re looking at,” explains Giese.
“It can be basically a three-click of the mouse action, so really easy to deploy … And based on our experience, we know which are the important values that actually might not be so easy to understand even for experts in network technology.”
SolarWinds can use the server and application monitor product as part of the whole approach, whether you’re dealing with the Orion platform with perpetual licensing or whether you’re dealing with subscription based licensing and hybrid cloud observability, confirms Fitzpatrick.
The full webinar has much more detail — click here for the full 22-minute presentation — or simply call QBS to talk through the array of benefits and options in SWI infrastructure management.
