Solved: Getting priced out of Solarwinds

🚀 Executive Summary TL;DR: SolarWinds users often face escalating licensing costs and vendor lock-in, leading to critical monitoring failures when element limits are reached. This article outlines strategies to break free, including immediate cost reduction through a ‘monitoring diet’ and a permanent migration to open-source observability stacks like Prometheus and Grafana. 🎯 Key Takeaways Implement a ‘Monitoring Diet’ by aggressively unenrolling non-production-critical or decommissioned devices from SolarWinds, potentially using the SWIS API, to reclaim licenses and reduce immediate costs. Migrate to a ‘Prometheus & Grafana’ stack for programmatic observability, shifting from SNMP pull-based monitoring to applications exposing metrics endpoints scraped by Prometheus, with visualization in Grafana and alerting via Alertmanager. Adopt a ‘Nuclear Option’ hybrid approach where SolarWinds is retained only for bare-minimum, non-negotiable devices (e.g., compliance, esoteric hardware), while