Free Practice Questions for SolarWinds Observability-Self-Hosted-Fundamentals Exam

In Hybrid Cloud Observability (HCO), reports are organized using specific metadata to make them searchable and manageable. According to theSolarWinds Platform Administrator Guide, every report created or provided out-of-the-box is associated with acategory.

Categories serve as the primary organizational structure in the Report Manager. Examples of standard categories include "Inventory," "Performance," "Historical," or "User Accounts". When creating a new report, the user is prompted to assign it to one of these categories or create a new one, which then dictates where the report appears in the navigation tree.

While the system may track who created a report, fields like "Owner" (Option D) or "Creator" (Option B) are not standard, visible metadata properties used for the primary sorting and management of web-based reports in the same way thecategoryis. "Format" (Option C) refers to the export type (PDF/Excel) and is a function of how the report is run or scheduled, rather than an inherent property of the report definition itself.

According to the SolarWinds Platform Administrator Guide for Hybrid Cloud Observability, theAppStack Environment Viewprovides an interactive, visual mapping of relationships between monitored entities such as applications, servers, and storage. In the provided image, it is evident thata filter is applied to show entities related to an application (A)because the left-hand navigation pane shows specific filters selected under the "Applications" category, and the main view displays a subset of the environment's total objects that correspond specifically to those application relationships. This filtering capability allows users to narrow down the environment to focus on the specific dependencies of a critical business service, such as Microsoft Active Directory or a SQL Server instance, which are shown as filtered groups in the sidebar.

Furthermore, it can be concluded thatthe option to hide categories with no objects is selected (B). A standard, unfiltered AppStack view typically displays every possible layer of the IT stack—including Transactions, LUNs, Pools, and Arrays—regardless of whether they contain active entities. However, in the provided view, only categories containing entities relevant to the current filter (such as Applications, Database Instances, Servers, and Volumes) are visible. This indicates that the "Hide categories with no objects" setting is active, which is a standard customization used to clean up the interface and highlight only the active parts of the dependency map.

While the view shows storage-related entities like "Volumes," this does not confirm whether theStorage Resource Monitor (SRM) is not installed (C), as basic volume data can often be collected via standard node polling. Additionally, the AppStack interface itself does not provide enough diagnostic data to verify if theuser account is given administrator access rights (D), as these visual elements are accessible to non-admin users with appropriate view permissions. Therefore, A and B are the only verified conclusions based on the visual evidence of the filtered environment.

Anomaly-Based Alertingin HCO is currently focused on high-cardinality performance metrics that exhibit clear cyclical patterns (daily or weekly cycles). According to theSolarWinds Platform Alerting Guide, the machine learning engine is optimized for metrics where "normal" behavior varies significantly based on time of day.

The two primary supported metrics for this feature are:

Average CPU Load (A): CPU utilization is highly variable; a server might be idle at night but busy during business hours. Anomaly detection learns these patterns to prevent false positives during scheduled peak times.

Percent Packet Loss (D): Network stability is a critical indicator of environmental health. By establishing a baseline for packet loss, the system can distinguish between a minor, expected "blip" in a high-traffic environment and a true anomaly that indicates a failing circuit or network congestion.

While metrics like "Disk Space Usage" (Option B) are critical, they are generally "linear" or "incremental" rather than cyclical; a disk filling up is a trend that is usually better handled by standard predictive or static threshold alerts. Similarly, while interface utilization is important, the initial release of anomaly-based features prioritizedNode-levelperformance metrics like CPU and Packet Loss to provide the most immediate value for identifying server and core network health deviations.

The ability to create or modify reports is a high-level administrative function in the SolarWinds Platform, distinct from the ability to simply view them. According to theSolarWinds Platform User Account Managementguide, this is controlled by theReport Managementright.

To restrict a specific group of users from creating or editing reports while still allowing them to view existing ones, the administrator mustremove the "Manage Reports" permissionfrom their user accounts. When this right is set to "No," the"Manage Reports" buttonis hidden from the "All Reports" view for that user. They can still click on and run any report they have access to, but they will lack the interface options to enter the "Report Builder," change schedules, or delete entries. This provides a secure way to delegate report consumption to the wider team while centralizing report creation within a smaller group of "power users" or administrators. Option D is incorrect as it refers toAlerts, which is a separate permission set entirely.

The alerting engine in the SolarWinds Platform uses a "Scope" and "Condition" logic to determine when an action should fire. According to theSolarWinds Platform Alerting Guide, the "Scope" defineswhichobjects the alert engine should evaluate, while the "Condition" defineswhatperformance metric triggers the alert.

To limit an alert to a specific set of router interfaces, the administrator mustmodify the scope on the trigger conditions. In the Alert Wizard, under the "Trigger Condition" tab, there is a section titled "I want to alert on..." (Interface) and a secondary section for "The scope of the alert". By adding specific rules to this scope—such as Node Name is Router-A or Interface Alias contains WAN—the alert engine will ignore the thousands of other interfaces in the database and only monitor the 75% utilization threshold on those specific targets. Using account limitations (Option D) is incorrect for this purpose, as account limitations affect what ausersees in the console, not how the backendalerting engineprocesses data.

For Network Operations Centers (NOCs) that display SolarWinds dashboards on large wall-mounted monitors, maintaining a continuous session is vital. By default, the SolarWinds Platform implements a security timeout (often 15 to 20 minutes of inactivity) that automatically logs a user out to protect the console.

According to theSolarWinds Platform Administrator Guide, to prevent this for a dedicated NOC account, the administrator mustdisable session timeout default settings (A). This is found within the "Advanced" section of the specific User Account settings. When this toggle is enabled, the platform ignores the global session timeout for that specific login, allowing the dashboard to refresh indefinitely without requiring manual re-authentication.

While granting management permissions (Options B and C) might allow the user tocreatethe view, it does nothing to prevent the session from expiring. Similarly, an "Account Expiration Date" (Option D) only controls the long-term validity of the account, not the duration of an individual active web session. Disabling the timeout is the standard procedural requirement for any "Service Account" or "Display Account" used in a continuous monitoring environment.

SolarWinds provides several ways to handle maintenance windows, but they have different impacts on historical data. According to theSolarWinds Platform Administrator Guide, "Unmanaging" a node (Option D) stops all polling entirely, resulting in "gaps" in your historical charts.

To prevent notifications whilepreserving data collection, the best practice is toMute the devices during maintenance. When a device is "Muted" (also known as "Pause Actions"), the platform continues to poll the device and record its status and performance metrics (CPU, Memory, Latency) into the database. However, the alerting engine is instructed to suppress any notification actions (emails, scripts, etc.) for that specific entity. This ensures that you have a full historical record of the device's behavior during the maintenance period—showing exactly when it went down and came back up—without flooding the IT team with unnecessary alerts.

Automation is a cornerstone of efficient node management in the SolarWinds Platform. To avoid the manual labor of updating groups every time a new device is commissioned, the platform utilizesDynamic Queries. According to theSolarWinds Platform Administrator Guide, the best-practice workflow for automated grouping involves two steps.

First, an administrator shouldcreate a custom property(e.g., City or ApplicationName). When new nodes are added via the "Add Node" wizard or Network Discovery, they are tagged with a specific value for that property. Second, the group's membership is defined by adynamic queryrather than a static list. For example, a group could be configured with a rule that states: "Add any node where City is equal to London".

Once this is configured, the platform's backend services periodically scan for any new nodes that match the criteria. As soon as a new server is added and its custom property is set, it isautomaticallyadded to the group without any further human intervention. This ensures that dashboards, alerts, and reports that rely on that group always reflect the current state of the infrastructure. Option D is incorrect because while alerts can trigger actions, they are not the standard architectural mechanism for group membership management.

Layout instability in the SolarWinds Web Console is almost always a result of overlapping permissions on shared views. According to theSolarWinds Platform Administrator Guide, summary views (dashboards) are often shared across entire departments or user groups.

The cause of widgets "moving" unexpectedly is typically thatusers have edit view rights and are editing views used by multiple users (D). In SolarWinds, if a view is assigned to multiple people and those people have the "Edit View" permission, any change made by one user—such as dragging a widget to a different column, adding a new resource, or removing an old one—is a global change to that view's definition in the database.

When User A rearranges the dashboard to suit their screen or preference, User B will see those changes the next time their page refreshes. This creates a "tug-of-war" scenario where different users keep moving widgets back and forth. To prevent this, administrators should follow the principle of least privilege: remove "Edit View" rights from standard users and only allow a small number of designated "View Administrators" to make changes. If individual personalization is required, the administrator should create unique, personal views for each user or group so that their edits do not impact the wider organization.

The SolarWinds Platform provides distinct tools for visualizing different aspects of environmental health and performance.AppStackis primarily an entity-relationship mapping tool. According to theSolarWinds SAM Administrator Guide, "The AppStack Environment view provides a powerful layer of troubleshooting visibility by exposing all participating objects in your environment, as well as their relationships to one another". It allows administrators to customize whichentities(nodes, applications, volumes, etc.) are visible and how they are grouped to show dependencies.

Conversely,PerfStack(Performance Analysis) is the engine used for metric correlation. As stated in theSolarWinds Platform Administrator Guide, PerfStack allows users to "drag and drop performance metrics from multiple entities onto a single chart to correlate data over time". While AppStack excels at showingwhatis connected, PerfStack excels at showinghowspecific metrics (CPU, Latency, IOPS) across those connected entities interact. Therefore, a combination is required where AppStack handles theentitiesand PerfStack handles themetrics. Specifically, you use AppStack to identify the scope of entities involved in a performance bottleneck and then transition those entities into a PerfStack project to perform a deep-dive analysis of the metrics. This modular approach ensures that troubleshooting is both contextually aware (via AppStack) and data-driven (via PerfStack).