MyKE / It's a Beautiful Day in the SWOC-erhood - THWACKcamp 2024

Created Wed, 17 Apr 2024 12:00:00 +0000
393 Words
THWACKcamp Observability SWO Monitoring

It's a Beautiful Day in the SWOC-erhood - THWACKcamp 2024

Back in April 2024, I got the chance to co-present a session at THWACKcamp 2024 - SolarWinds’ annual virtual IT learning event that has been bringing together thousands of tech professionals for over a decade. The session was called “It’s a Beautiful Day in the SWOC-erhood: Real World Applications of SolarWinds Observability”, and I co-presented it with Kevin M. Sparenberg and Howard Williams Jr.

What the Session Was About

Our goal was simple - show how the SolarWinds Operations Center (SWOC), our internal EngOps team, actually uses SolarWinds Observability (SWO) day to day. This wasn’t a marketing pitch. It was a real look at how we shifted from traditional monitoring to observability and what that journey looked like from the trenches.

We showed how SWO helps us monitor and maintain the infrastructure that keeps SolarWinds engineering running - CI/CD pipelines, build systems, cloud environments, and internal services. The “drink your own champagne” philosophy is very much alive at SolarWinds, and we wanted to show that it’s not just a slogan. We rely on the same tooling we ship to customers.

Key Takeaways from the Demo

During the demo, I walked through several real-world scenarios showing how we use SWO in our EngOps team:

  • Unified observability across hybrid infrastructure - We run AWS and on-prem resources. SWO gives us a single pane of glass to correlate metrics, logs, and traces across all of them.
  • Alerting and noise reduction - We showed how we tuned our alerting strategy to surface only actionable issues, reducing mean time to resolution (MTTR).
  • Infrastructure health dashboards - We built dashboards tracking key metrics like build queue times, CI/CD success rates, runner fleet utilization, and infrastructure availability - the things that directly impact developer productivity.

Why It Mattered

For me, presenting at THWACKcamp was a great milestone. It was a chance to represent the engineering operations side of SolarWinds and share practical insights with a community of IT professionals who face similar challenges every day. The THWACK community is one of the most engaged tech communities out there, and the live chat during the session was full of great questions and discussions.

Watch the Session

If the embedded video doesn’t load, you can watch it directly on Wistia.