SolarWinds Observability Self-Hosted review: Bish, bash, SWOSH – SolarWinds delivers classy network monitoring at a good price

One of our biggest gripes about network monitoring software products is their convoluted and confusing licensing schemes. Some charge by sensor, monitored element, volume, or network port; others do it by node or device, and there's also the extra cost of optional add-on modules.

The SolarWinds Observability suites cut through the confusion as you can choose from SaaS cloud-hosted or on-premises versions, and both are licensed purely by the node. We review the SolarWinds Observability Self-Hosted (SWOSH) version which offers three simple subscription plans.

With a monthly cost of around £6 per node, the SWOSH Essentials edition teams up SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor (NPM) module with the Log Analyzer, Server & Application Monitor (SAM), IP Address Manager (IPAM), VoIP & Network Quality Manager (VNQM) and User Device Tracker (UDT). The Advanced edition is well worth considering as for £10 per node/month, this adds the Network Configuration Manager (NCM), NetFlow Traffic Monitor (NTA), Virtualization Manager (VMAN) plus Server Configuration Manager (SCM) and also introduces the new ML-powered anomaly alerting service.

The Premier edition pushes the monthly node price to £13 and augments Advanced with storage and web performance monitoring and an incident response service. It also offers value-based licensing where you can monitor elements such as containers and on-premises virtual machines (VMs) without consuming a full node license.

SolarWinds Observability Self-Hosted review: Easy deployment

SWOSH offers a remarkable range of monitoring components, and all are neatly integrated into the Orion web console. This provides a single pane of glass, with the console's 'My Dashboard' tab presenting a drop-down menu for access to each module and its associated metrics, along with three other menus for alerts and activity, reports, and all settings.

We deployed SWOSH on a Windows Server 2025 Hyper-V VM in the lab with a single routine handling the entire process and taking 40 minutes to download and install all components. As we were evaluating SWOSH, we used the included SQL Server Express database, but for production environments, you'll need to source a full version of SQL Server 2016 or later.

Also, pay particular attention to the minimum hardware requirements. We started our VM with eight Xeon Scalable Gold vCPUs and 16GB of virtual memory but had to increase it to 32GB as we were receiving low memory alerts for the host system.

SolarWinds Observability Self-Hosted review: Voyage of discovery

The Discovery Central page offers wizard-assisted routines to discover cloud entities and network devices. We started with a scan of our lab network and ran through adding our network subnet and providing credentials for SNMP, Windows WMI, and VMware, after which SWOSH reported back in 10 minutes with a complete list of all identified systems.

Cloud monitoring services are provided for AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform. We chose AWS and found the discovery process simple, as after providing our access and secret keys, SWOSH presented a dashboard of all our resources, including cloud instances and S3 buckets.

Discovery Central also provides a section for configuring the new AI agent. This uses the Platform Connect service to link up with the SolarWinds AIOps cloud service using a choice of three global data locations.

The agent presents a right-hand side menu where you can ask natural language questions about anything on your network or how to achieve something. It's currently in SW1 preview and focuses on the SolarWinds knowledge base documentation and the current state of your network. It impressed us nonetheless, as it came back with detailed answers to questions about, for example, the status of our VMware estate, the most critical nodes and patterns in alert summaries.

SolarWinds Observability Self-Hosted review: The Orion console

The home page presents a bold summary with at-a-glance views of your entire network. Widgets are included for areas such as node, group and application status, active alerts by severity, Top 10 views, hardware status plus anomaly-based alerts, and dashboards can be customised by creating new widgets for specific interests and dragging them to the desired location.

From NPM, you can pull up detailed summaries of all monitored nodes, each assigned a colour-coded status icon, see active alerts, a network Top 10 plus routing insights, and use NetPath to monitor external web locations and see hop-by-hop maps with latency and packet loss details for each step. NTA is another easy one to use as it automatically picked up the NetFlow feeds from our WatchGuard firewall appliance and provided detailed views of detected applications, the top conversations and busiest endpoints.

Accessed from the Home menu, the PerfStack Analysis tool can be used to identify the root cause of network problems by comparing data collected from multiple devices in one dashboard. You'll find the Quality of Experience (QoE) service here too, which uses sensors linked to switch mirror ports to identify, categorise and analyse traffic for over 1,500 applications.

The discovery process automatically identifies running apps, with the SAM module providing heaps of templates for monitoring server and app performance, although some are old enough to be in a museum. For MS365 monitoring, we were pleased to see SolarWinds has replaced its clunky PowerShell queries with API poller templates which are much easier to use.

SolarWinds Observability Self-Hosted review: Hardware health, VMAN, SCM and anomalies

If SWOSH detects a supported server during discovery, it'll assign a hardware health sensor resource that provides details on system temperatures, power consumption, and cooling fan status. It worked for our HPE ProLiant iLO-equipped servers as SolarWinds no longer needs HPE's System Insight Manager (SIM), but Dell fans must continue using the pensionable OpenManage Server Administrator (OMSA) as native support for iDRAC controllers probably won't be implemented until the 2027.2 release.

The Advanced version is ideal for businesses big on virtualisation as it includes the VMAN module. This augments NPM's basic availability checks with full host monitoring, reports on CPU, memory plus datastore usage, views of VM resource use and capacity planning reports.

SCM's hardware and software inventory were found to be accurate, and we used its baselines to keep track of server and application changes on our Windows hosts. The new anomaly alerting service allows you to create custom alerts that go beyond the static thresholds used by NPM. They're simple to create as you provide a name, assign one of five alert levels, apply it to a node, interface or VM, and add conditions such as average CPU load with a threshold of your choosing.

SolarWinds Observability Self-Hosted review: Is it worth it?

SolarWinds Observability Self-Hosted is good value as its cost per node is significantly lower than many competing products and made all the more affordable thanks to the sheer number of monitoring modules included. There are a lot of features to play with so it'll take some time to get it configured to your requirements but the suite is simple to install and easily managed from a single web console.