In a recent post, @gerardodada asked, “What you would do with PerfStack?” The community provided some great ways to use this new feature. For those who don’t know what PerfStack is, I’d like to take explain further. PerfStack is a new performance analysis visualization component of the Orion Platform that enables users to build custom dashboards of time series data. This allows end-users to troubleshoot issues quickly by pinpointing root cause. By building on Orion’s modular architecture (shown below), this new component efficiently filters through a multitude of collected metrics. It automatically understands entity dependencies from application to infrastructure, seamlessly adheres to access control rules, and presents data in a way that’s both intelligent and easy to use.
Orion’s Modular Architecture
The Orion Platform provides a set of common services, including security, UX framework, alerting, reporting, data acquisition, and data persistence. SolarWinds products NPM, NCM, NTA, SAM, VMAN, SRM, and others plug into this framework and leverage these common platform services. On top of the platform services, there are components like PerfStack and AppStack that automatically inherit other components in the Orion Platform.
PerfStack gets much of its ease of use from SWIS and the AppStack component, as discussed in the blog, A Lap Around AppStack. PerfStack extends AppStack by quickly gathering, correlating, and presenting the thousands of metrics related to this chain of entities in a logical, intuitive, and searchable fashion.
For the visualization, PerfStack relies heavily on the UI framework, specifically two recent additions: Apollo, which is an Angular JS framework, and D3, a JS graphing library. The Apollo Angular framework renders the Metric Palette, enabling succinct navigation and coupling of statistics to graphs. D3 provides the incredible array of high resolution graphs and charts. D3 is the same technology behind the awe-inspiring topology graphs you see in NetPath/
PerfStack automatically inherits account limitations from the security service that restricts access only to the entities the end-user has permission to access. Custom-configured Performance Analysis dashboards can be saved via a data persistence service that allows for easy loading of common, recurring troubleshooting scenarios.
SolarWinds continues to invest heavily in Orion’s modular platform architecture, which adds functionality to existing services and new components, increasing overall functionality and scalability. What that means for customers is that products like NPM, SAM, and others – including PerfStack – will add new features faster, with more functionality and scalability.