Embed VividCortex data in Slack, preview Alerts before creating them, assess database health with new Notebook templates, and more.

VividCortex is now SolarWinds DPM!

On December 11, 2019, we announced the acquisition of VividCortex, and today we’re launching SolarWinds Database Performance Monitor (DPM) - new name, same great product. The renaming of VividCortex helps us add DPM into the database performance management portfolio, so SolarWinds now offers cross-platform database tuning and optimization solutions for Oracle and SQL Server (through SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer) in addition to the open source databases that DPM covers.

You can read more about this change here

VividCortex Slack App Now Available

The VividCortex Slack app allows you to display any VividCortex chart or metric within Slack using slash commands. This includes the ability to choose the environment, hosts, and timeframe, as well as set a persistent context to be used repeatedly in your requests. Any of the charts or metrics visibile in VividCortex can now be displayed directly in Slack.

Check out the documentation to learn more about its features, and download it here.

Alert Preview

Now when creating a new Alert, both Event-based and threshold-based, we include a preview of the Event or metric for the last hour, day, week, and month. This lets you see how the Event or metric has behaved in the past, making it easier to see how it may behave in the future. For a threshold Alert, you can adjust the trigger value up or down and see when it would have triggered with a dynamic plotted line.

New Health Check & Code Deployment Templates

We continue to expand our Notebooks functionality through templates, and have added a new PostgreSQL Health Inspection template (which joins the MySQL version released last summer) and a Developer Deployment Runbook. Both of these can be accessed by navigating to Notebooks, choosing “New Notebook,” and then selecting a template from the drop-down.

Our health inspection templates guide a user through assessing database health, by walking through a series of important indicators of performance and resource utilization. The Developer Deployment Runbook template is designed to guide developers through items to check after a code change. It includes four checks, guidance on what metrics to examine, why those metrics matter to the databse and application, and what specifically to check for.

User Created Templates

In addition to our VividCortex templates users can now create their own templates to share with the team. User templates can be created for both Notebooks and Dashboards. To create a template, navigate to either Notebooks or Dashboards, choose “New Notebook” (or “New Dashboard”) and then “Blank Template.” After creating and saving the template, any user in the account can then click “New” again and your template will appear in the drop-down list.

User-Based Time Zone Settings

Users now have the ability to set a time zone specific to their profile, and override other default or custom settings, without affecting other users. This means each member of your team can view VividCortex in one of three ways: using the environment’s default timezone, using the timezone of their browser (local time), or a custom time specific to that user. This setting can be changed in Settings -> Profile.

Other Notes

• When viewing processlist, pg_stat_activity, or currentOp queries, there is now a link to the relevant Query Details page with query text.
• You can now opt to collapse the filter options in Profiler; it will persist your choices.
• You can no longer rank by Latency P99.
• Explorer now includes the ability to see query samples as a Dataset.
• Creating a Notebook and changing its custom time no longer creates a duplicate.
• Added a dashed line to Explorer’s datasets charts when hovering over a system metric.
• The Apply button will now appropriately display when enabling time comparison in Safari.
• Fixed an issue where chart screenshares were not not using the browser’s timezone.
• Added more descriptive error messaging to the Slack integration.
• The Add New Host wizard will now find OS hosts registered deeper into the past.
• Explorer will now appropriate persist the “Hide VividCortex Queries” setting.
• The long-running query detector will now appropriately handle a duration of -1 returned by the database.
• Digesting $ in queries is now handled appropriately.
• Fixed a bug where exporting queries from Profiler was not quoting commas correctly.
• Fixed an issue where query samples for off-host Mongo were not capturing user and origin.
• Mongo agents better handle intermittent connection losses with the database.