Who is SolarWinds?
SolarWinds is an enterprise software company that provides IT Operations Management (ITOM), observability, and security solutions for hybrid and multi-cloud environments.
- IT infrastructure and application observability platforms (observability)
- Network performance monitoring and diagnostics tools (network monitoring)
- Database performance monitoring and optimization software (database monitoring)
- IT service management and help desk solutions (ITSM)
- Security, access, and configuration management offerings for IT environments (IT security and compliance)
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More About SolarWinds
SolarWinds develops software for enterprises, public sector entities, and service providers that need visibility into the performance, availability, and configuration of their IT estates, spanning on-premises (on-prem) data centers, hosted infrastructure, and public cloud platforms.
The company’s offerings focus on observability (observability) across networks, systems, applications, and databases, providing telemetry collection, alerting, and analytics so IT operations, DevOps, and Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) teams can detect and diagnose performance issues and capacity constraints.
In network monitoring (network monitoring), SolarWinds tools are used to track device health, bandwidth utilization, latency, and path performance across routers, switches, firewalls, wireless infrastructure, and hybrid Wide Area Network (WAN) environments, often integrating with Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP), NetFlow and related flow protocols, and standard IP networking technologies.
For database environments (database monitoring), SolarWinds provides capabilities to monitor query performance, wait times, resource contention, and configuration baselines for platforms such as SQL-based relational databases, helping database administrators analyze workload patterns and tune indexes, queries, and resource allocations.
SolarWinds IT service management products (ITSM) offer service desk, incident, problem, change, and asset management functions that align with ITIL-style processes, linking tickets to configuration items and monitored infrastructure so operations teams can correlate user-reported issues with underlying technical metrics.
Security-oriented offerings (IT security and compliance) address access control, auditing, and configuration assessment for infrastructure components and applications, supporting activities such as privileged account usage tracking, change monitoring, and compliance reporting for regulated or policy-driven environments.
Architecturally, SolarWinds platforms commonly use agent-based and agentless data collection, RESTful APIs, standard monitoring protocols, and web-based consoles, allowing integration into existing enterprise management stacks and workflows such as Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) pipelines, ITSM tools, and automation frameworks.
Within an enterprise technology directory, SolarWinds aligns with categories including observability and Application Performance Management (APM), network performance monitoring, database performance monitoring, IT service management, and IT security/compliance tooling, and is typically evaluated alongside other commercial and open-source vendors in these segments.
Our description of SolarWinds. Updated December 2025.
