How SolarWinds Continuously Monitors Change Across Large Distributed Architectures

One of the significant challenges for us is collaborating on a shared set of facts. We have dynamic systems and architecture that changes constantly, and the teams working on them are spread across the US, Europe, and Asia. That makes it hard for everyone to understand how environments are changing.

The important thing to know about Kosli is that it records exactly what’s been deployed - and where, when, and how it was deployed. That means an engineer in the United States has all the context required to understand what changed earlier in the day, long after colleagues in Europe and Asia have logged off.

Incident response illustrates exactly why this is useful. If a team in one part of the world is responding to an outage because of a bad change deployed in another region, they can use Kosli to quickly understand how and when that change happened. There’s no guesswork or calling people in the middle of the night to figure out which change caused the issue. We can get to the change we need quickly.

Kosli doesn’t just help us to respond to incidents, it helps us to reduce their frequency. Because we can use Kosli to track the history of a deployment, it’s easy for us to gate release candidates that haven’t been through the test environment. So, nothing goes to production without going through testing, making outages much less likely.

Kosli also gives us the insights we need to deliver more value to our customers. Our developers have observability over what has been deployed to production, so they can be sure that the features they spent time on have been shipped.

Because the history of deployments is recorded in Kosli, the manual work required for compliance and audit is greatly reduced. The evidence for a secure chain of custody is readily available from the app.

Overall, Kosli simplifies our software delivery process, and it frees up time for us to work on the things that really add value.