SolarWinds Security Observability

Security Observability involves collecting and aggregating performance metrics to spot trends and existing or potential problems. It can monitor activities across your organization’s networks, systems, and applications to help you gain valuable security insights. This integration can gather and analyze logs from software programs, network activity, and user actions, providing insights into overall system health and helping you identify security threats, vulnerabilities, and suspicious activities in real time.

You can delegate your observability solution to collecting and centralizing performance insights like latency and downtime, event information, and log data, saving you from manually pulling logs and metrics on system by system. This proactive approach can help your security team detect, investigate, and respond to security incidents more effectively, ultimately improving your overall security posture.

The SolarWinds Observability Self-Hosted with Security Observability integration can gather and present information on security-related events across your network, cloud, and hybrid infrastructures, databases, and applications in a centralized security dashboard. It is a unified, full-stack on-prem platform that offers deployment flexibility, high scalability, and comprehensive visibility.

In addition to easily integrating with SolarWinds Observability Self-Hosted, SolarWinds Security Observability supports Open Telemetry and third-party integrations, allowing you to gain an unparalleled view across your hybrid, on-premises, cloud-native, and multi-cloud environments. Security Observability can collect data from metrics, logs, database queries, traces, and user experience.

The end result is a more holistic view of your organization’s landscape, including its cloud-native applications. Having a single source of accurate information can help you identify existing or potential vulnerabilities, risks, and compliance issues faster.

Observability for security means gaining insights into the internal state of systems and applications by analyzing their behavior and performance metrics. Security information and event management involves collecting, correlating, and analyzing security-related data from various sources to effectively detect and respond to security threats and incidents. Observability is more general, focusing on using logs, traces, queries, and metrics to identify potential risks and monitor threats, while SIEM solutions collect and analyze log and event data for real-time threat analysis and incident response.

While monitoring is a reactionary response, observability is more proactive. Both monitoring and observability involve collecting and analyzing information, but observability takes monitoring a step further.

Monitoring involves systematically collecting and analyzing logs, performance metrics, and other information to better understand an infrastructure and its’ applications’ current states. With thorough monitoring, you can track errors to identify issues. Many monitoring tools can also automatically send alerts and notifications based on predetermined thresholds to notify administrators of potential problems.

Observability goes beyond mere data collection and is based on a more proactive response. When done correctly, an observability strategy can provide actionable insights, allowing you to resolve problems faster or even prevent them from occurring. Observability can provide insights into the root cause of incidents, resulting in a deeper understanding of your overall network. You can better understand system behavior and dependencies, enabling you to troubleshoot complex issues.

If you have SolarWinds Observability Self-Hosted Advanced, SEM, and ARM licenses, you can integrate SolarWinds Observability Self-Hosted with SEM and ARM to gain a more complete picture of your IT environment. However, if you have a SolarWinds Observability Self-Hosted license and either an SEM or an ARM license, you’ll only be able to view a selection of dashboards in SolarWinds Observability Self-Hosted.

Integrating ​​Security Observability with ARM or SEM is a fast, simple process. You’ll need to:

• Head to the SolarWinds Platform Web Console
• Click Settings
• Click All Settings
• Scroll to the Product Specific Settings portion of the page
• Click Security Settings
• Pick whether you want to integrate ARM or SEM with SolarWinds Observability Self-Hosted
• ARM: Enter your ARM server’s base URL and your ARM username and password before clicking Submit
• SEM: Enter your SEM server’s base URL and your SEM username and password before clicking Submit

Once you have integrated ARM or SEM with Security Observability, you will be able to access a detailed security dashboard and create custom dashboards with security widgets that suit your needs.

When you take advantage of SolarWinds Observability Self-Hosted's security integration, you can expect:

• To gain insights into the whole internal state of complex distributed systems/environments: Security Observability was designed to provide organizations with incredible observability into their complex distributed systems and environments, no matter how large or small.
• A single source of truth to simplify decision-making: Instead of scouring through multiple tools and interfaces and manually collating the information, you can quickly and easily access all relevant information from one centralized location.
• Faster time to resolution: Thanks to the holistic view of your IT infrastructure and its services, you can quickly understand what’s happening on your network and take effective action.
• Less alert fatigue: By intelligently assigning risk scores based on issues’ severity, this security hybrid cloud tool helps to reduce the noise of unnecessary notifications.
• Less tool sprawl: View data from across your cloud, infrastructure, applications, databases, and entire network, to streamline monitoring and troubleshooting processes without needing multiple disparate tools or platforms.