The SolarWinds AppStack™ Environment view provides you with detailed
visibility to the performance of your environment
and also provides an automatic map of how all system objects relate to one another,
so you can identify the trouble area immediately.
AppStack is a view that is dynamically created and updated.
The AppStack view combines object status data
from multiple SolarWinds products
to provide you with a complete picture of your application health
in context of the supporting infrastructure.
The following products can be used to provide AppStack with the information it displays:
Server & Application Monitor, Virtualization Manager,
Storage Resource Monitor, and Web Performance Monitor.
As each product is added to your Orion® installation,
additional information will be displayed.
Let’s discuss in a slightly more detail what each product brings to AppStack.
Server & Application Monitor (SAM) provides AppStack with visibility to applications,
operating systems, and server metrics.
Server & Application Monitor provides broad coverage,
letting you monitor virtually any commercial or custom application
whether they are running on-premises or in a cloud.
Virtualization Manager enables AppStack to have visibility to virtual machines,
hosts, clusters & datastores,
and supports VMware® and Hyper-V®.
Storage Resource Monitor supplies AppStack visibility to SAN & NAS array LUNs,
raid groups, volumes, and disks for multiple vendors
including EMC®, NetApp®, Dell®, HP®, IBM®, and more.
Web Performance Monitor delivers visibility of end user experience
for web and SaaS application transactions.
Before we go any further, let’s take a look at the AppStack interface.
From ‘My Dashboards’, under the ‘Home’ menu,
select the ‘Environment’ option.
This will load the AppStack view.
The AppStack Environment view is designed to provide you
with a powerful layer of troubleshooting visibility
by exposing all participating objects in your environment,
as well as their relationships to one another.
This view is useful in assessing the overall health of your environment,
as well as troubleshooting specific and related problems.
For each of the resources monitored, there is a status displayed.
The color is based on the object’s current status
that is generated by product-specific thresholds, which can be customized.
To the left of this view, you will see a legend for what all the status icons mean.
Objects will be in one of the following states, represented by its icon's color and shape.
To the left of the Environment View, you can see the ability to sort the view by object status.
You can also type a key word in the search bar
to find a particular application, group, or server type.
In order to add additional filtering options, simply click on ‘Add Filter Properties’,
select an object, like a node.
And then select what you would like to filter on,
location, department, vendor, OS version, etc. and then 'Apply.'
Once you've created a filter, you can provide that view to other groups or departments.
For instance, if I want to give a department VP
access to only the performance of resources in her department.
Another option would be to adjust the account permissions
for that VP to limit the access to the entire account.
You can also narrow the view to eliminate empty categories
and change the update interval as well.
Simply click the drop-down box and select ‘Change Layout Settings.'
Here you make your changes.
Once you make your changes, go ahead and save.
Using AppStack as a troubleshooting tool is fairly straightforward.
In the AppStack Environment view,
click on an object to see what is related to that object.
To investigate further,
navigate to the Details page of the object or any related object.
For example, there we see all of the applications
that are monitored in your environment.
The Microsoft IIS application is in a critical state,
as indicated by its icon.
To see what this application is related to,
click the IIS object.
To hide the unrelated objects completely from this view,
click ‘Spotlight’ in the upper right-hand corner of the view.
Now, you have a narrowed down view of your environment in context of the selected application.