SolarWinds Observability-Self-Hosted-Fundamentals Practice Test Questions Answers

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.

Platform Connectis a foundational technology in Hybrid Cloud Observability (HCO) that bridges the gap between the on-premises (self-hosted) installation and SolarWinds' cloud-based AIOps and machine learning services. According to theSolarWinds HCO Administrator Guide, the primary function enabled by this connection isanomaly-based alerting.

Anomaly detection requires significant computational resources to process months of historical performance data and build sophisticated behavioral baselines for thousands of metrics. To prevent this heavy processing from impacting the performance of the local monitoring server, SolarWinds offloads the analysis to a cloud-based machine learning engine.Platform Connectprovides the secure, encrypted tunnel required to transmit relevant performance metadata to the cloud for analysis and receive dynamic threshold updates in return.

Without Platform Connect, the local instance is restricted to traditional static thresholds (e.g., "Alert if CPU > 90%"). With it, the system can identify "unusual" behavior (e.g., "Alert if CPU is 70% at 2:00 AM on a Tuesday, when it is normally 10%"). While HCO handles infrastructure monitoring and mapping locally, the specific "intelligence" layer that drives anomaly detection is the standout benefit provided by the Platform Connect architecture.

Groups in the SolarWinds Platform are logical containers used to organize monitored entities for easier management, alerting, and reporting. According to theSolarWinds Platform Administrator Guide, one of the most powerful features of the grouping engine is the ability to automate membership. Specifically,groups can be created based on custom properties.

When defining a group, administrators can choose between "Static Selection" (manual) or "Dynamic Query." By using dynamic queries, a group can be configured to automatically include any node, interface, or volume that matches specific criteria, such as a custom property value (e.g., Department = Engineering or Site = London). This ensures that as new infrastructure is added to the environment and tagged with the appropriate metadata, the groups update themselves without human intervention.

Regarding the other options: groupscanbe members of other groups (nested groups), which is a common practice for creating complex hierarchical views of an organization. The default status rollup mode is typically set to "Mixed" or "Show Worst Status" rather than "Best Status," to ensure that any single failure within the group is visible to the administrator. Finally, rollup options absolutely apply to all members within the group, as they define how the collective health of those members is calculated and displayed on the dashboard.

Custom properties can be configured as "Mandatory" to ensure data integrity across the platform. According to theSolarWinds Platform Administrator Guide, changing a property like AssetTag to mandatory after nodes already exist creates an enforcement requirement.

The system does not retroactively block polling or delete nodes (Option B and D are incorrect), but it enforces the requirement during administrative interaction. Specifically:

Requirement after the action (A): Moving forward, any new node added to the system will require the AssetTag field to be populated before the node can be saved.

Requirement when edited (C): For existing nodes that do not yet have an AssetTag, the platform will permit them to exist and be polled normally. However, the next time an administrator attempts toeditthe properties of that node, the Web Console will block the "Save" action until a value is provided for the mandatory AssetTag field. This ensures that as the environment is managed over time, the metadata is gradually backfilled until all mandatory requirements are satisfied.

AppStackis designed to provide a "top-to-bottom" visual representation of the IT infrastructure layers that support an application. According to theSolarWinds Platform Administrator Guide, the AppStack Environment view automatically maps relationships between specific monitored entities.

The two primary categories that appear in this view aredatabase instances (A)andservers (C). In a typical application stack, the "Server" represents the physical or virtual hardware, while the "Database Instance" (monitored via AppInsight for SQL, Oracle, etc.) represents the software layer running on that server. AppStack visually links these so that if a database instance shows a critical status, an administrator can instantly see which server it is hosted on and if there are underlying infrastructure issues. Other common categories include Applications, Transactions, Virtual Hosts, Clusters, and Volumes.

NetFlow(Option B) is a traffic analysis technology used in the NetFlow Traffic Analyzer (NTA) and is generally not a primary "entity" category in the standard AppStack environment map.SNMP Pollers(Option D) are the backend mechanisms used to collect data; they are a configuration component rather than a logical infrastructure entity that would be represented as a layer in an application dependency stack.