SolarWinds announces updates to web performance monitoring products

IT management software SolarWinds has announced enhancements to its web performance monitoring products, including updates to both the SolarWinds Orion Platform-based Web Performance Monitor (WPM), now WPM 3.0, and its SaaS-based SolarWinds Pingdom solution.

The web performance monitoring product updates deepen the company's commitment to meeting the needs of technology professionals operating in on-premises IT environments inside the firewall as well as hybrid and public-cloud environments.

The new features in the updated version of WPM 3.0 and Pingdom meet the needs of both IT operations and DevOps teams in unprecedented ways.

With the improved functionalities, technology professionals managing every type of environment can monitor website availability and performance, creating a better overall user experience.

SolarWinds application management products vice president Jim Hansen says, "By offering web performance monitoring products that complement one another while also solving varied use cases, we're meeting the needs of tech pros across all tech environments in multiple ways.

 WPM is a comprehensive monitoring solution for SaaS applications and websites that helps users find and fix web performance issues quickly and effectively by monitoring websites and web-based applications from distributed locations.

The updated WPM 3.0 version now includes: 

• An improved synthetic user monitoring solution which streamlines troubleshooting to quickly mitigate issues hindering the user experience of modern applications.
   
• The ability to monitor the performance of websites and web-based applications from inside the firewall, helping ensure employees can gain access to the applications they need.
   
• Improvements to the integrated view of website and web-based applications performance monitoring—making troubleshooting significantly faster via a single pane of glass.
   
• Comprehensive monitoring of critical Microsoft application services also expands the breadth and depth of WPM's capabilities. With WPM, users receive insight and visibility into application performance and health for supported Microsoft technologies.

Pingdom provides web application performance monitoring outside the firewall, including real user monitoring (RUM), uptime, page speed, and synthetics.

By providing a real-time, outside-in look at a web application's availability and performance, Pingdom helps ensure continual availability and performance.

With its latest update, Pingdom has made several improvements based on user feedback, including:

• Transaction check sleep – Some transactions take more time between steps. Pingdom added the capability to include a timed pause or "sleep" in a transaction before it checks to see if that step executed correctly, thus reducing the potential of a false failed test of a transaction step.
   
• Contextual and actionable alerts – Users have requested the capability to leave a message within an alert for the next team member on call. Now they can leave a custom message with instructions or additional information to further streamline troubleshooting.
   
• Flexible maintenance windows – Users have asked for the option to bulk-select maintenance windows to avoid running checks during designated times. For example, now users can identify a weekly maintenance window so checks don't run while they're applying security patches on Microsoft Patch Tuesday.

Pingdom is part of the SolarWinds application performance management (APM) suite, including AppOptics, Loggly, and Papertrail.

These products can be used individually to help ensure the performance and availability of custom applications and websites, or used together to maintain full-stack visibility.