Observability Self Hosted Fundamentals Certification Exam Guide + Practice Questions

Explanation:
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 the SolarWinds Platform User Account Management guide, this is controlled by the Report Management right.
To restrict a specific group of users from creating or editing reports while still allowing them to view existing ones, the administrator must remove the "Manage Reports" permission from their user accounts. When this right is set to "No," the "Manage Reports" button is 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 to Alerts, which is a separate permission set entirely.

Explanation:
Account Limitations are security filters applied at the user or group level to control data visibility
within the Web Console. According to the SolarWinds Platform User Account Management guide, these limitations do not affect how data is collected (polling), but rather who can see the resulting data.
The two primary use cases are:
Access by Department (A): Organizations often use custom properties (like "Department") to tag nodes. By applying an account limitation, you can ensure that the "Finance" team only sees servers tagged for their department, while the "IT" team sees the entire infrastructure.
Access by Device Type (B): Limitations can be set based on vendor, machine type, or other attributes. For instance, a Network Operations Center (NOC) team might be limited to seeing only "Cisco" or "Juniper" devices to keep their dashboard focused purely on networking gear.
Option C is incorrect because "access to features" (like the ability to manage alerts or reports) is handled via Account Permissions, not limitations. Option D is incorrect because "polling of devices" is a backend function of the Polling Engines, which is managed via the "Manage Nodes" section rather than user-facing account limitations.

Explanation:
In the SolarWinds alerting workflow, "Acknowledgment" is a critical state change that coordinates the human response to an incident. According to the SolarWinds Platform Alerting Guide, acknowledging an alert communicates to the rest of the team that a specific technician has taken ownership of the issue.
The formal definition of acknowledgment is that the issue is being worked on and the alert will not be escalated. This is the most important functional result of the action: it halts the automated escalation chain. If an alert was configured to email a manager after 30 minutes of inactivity, acknowledging the alert at the 15-minute mark cancels that pending manager email. It signals to the system―and other operators―that active troubleshooting is underway and further automated "noise" is unnecessary.
It is important to note that acknowledgment does not mean the issue is resolved (Option A); the alert remains active in the "All Active Alerts" list (though often filtered into an "Acknowledged" category) until the underlying trigger condition is cleared by the monitoring engine. It is a procedural tool for incident management, ensuring that once a human engages with a problem, the platform's automated notification logic steps aside to let them work without further distraction.

Explanation:
According to the SolarWinds Platform configuration documentation, the option to Encrypt connections with SSL during the database configuration wizard specifically dictates the security level of the communication channel between the application server and the database backend. When this box is checked, the platform ensures that the network data between SolarWinds' Hybrid Cloud Observability Platform server and the SQL server will be encrypted. This security measure is critical for protecting the integrity and confidentiality of the performance metrics, configuration data, and credentials as they traverse the internal network between these two primary architectural components.
This encryption utilizes Transport Layer Security (TLS) to wrap the TDS (Tabular Data Stream) protocol used by Microsoft SQL Server. By enabling this feature, the platform prevents potential "man-in-the-middle" attacks where an adversary could sniff network traffic to intercept sensitive monitoring data or administrative information stored within the SQL database. It is important to note that for this setting to function correctly, the SQL Server must be configured with a valid SSL/TLS certificate that is trusted by the SolarWinds application server.
This setting differs from simple credential encryption (Option C) or secure storage (Option B) because it applies to all data transmitted during the session, not just the initial login exchange. Furthermore, while the configuration wizard does require a login account (Option A), that account's specific permissions are a separate functional requirement from the underlying encryption of the transport layer. Enabling SSL encryption is a standard best practice for organizations following strict compliance frameworks like HIPAA, PCI-DSS, or SOC2, where protecting data-in-transit is a mandatory requirement even on internal, "trusted" network segments. This centralized encryption toggle simplifies the deployment of high-security observability environments by orchestrating the secure connection parameters through the standard SolarWinds Configuration Wizard interface.

Explanation:
The transition from the legacy Orion Platform to Hybrid Cloud Observability (HCO) introduced stricter hardware and software prerequisites to support modern features like AIOps, advanced mapping, and high-performance data processing. According to the SolarWinds Hybrid Cloud Observability System Requirements, the platform requires modern SQL features for optimal performance.
While legacy versions of the Orion Platform may have supported SQL Server 2016 or even 2012 in older iterations, MS SQL Server 2019 is identified as the minimum supported version for new HCO installations. This requirement ensures compatibility with the latest database indexing and query optimization techniques used by the SolarWinds Platform to handle the high volume of time-series data generated by observability nodes. Additionally, using SQL 2019 or later (including SQL 2022) is necessary to ensure the platform can utilize specific security protocols and memory management improvements that are not available in the end-of-life SQL 2012 or SP1 versions of 2016.