Again, I am very new to SolarWinds, however, in less than a month working in the SW environment, and a mere two weeks in my current job (managing a large SW base), it has occurred to me that SW has missed an opportunity to aid Administrators in large environments where SW integration is concerned.
In large environments with large IT staffs, the biggest difficulty in configuring and maintaining the SW monitoring system is ensuring that intentional changes to the environment are reported, and therefore properly integrated into SW. In my workplace, there at least 35 people on the IT staff, supporting approx. 20,000 students and the related network services. Changes occur frequently and are not necessarily reported to any centralized management in a timely fashion, if at all.
If IT techs had the ability to log into SW, click on a customized "Reporting" view, or tab within SW that enabled them to report changes in a standard change-log fashion to a centralized database that is actually integrated into SW, said changes could be reflected by the monitoring environment faster and more efficiently than utilizing external software (ie email, secondary database, messaging), and would provide a historical reference to measure against existing monitored systems. Or even provide a "Request for Monitoring" form with regard to network and server additions.
Managing IT large infrastructures can become exceptionally complex, as all IT managers/administrators know. Given the database driven, monitoring and reporting nature of SolarWinds, it would seem a natural fit to have a tab/section/module specifically dedicated to remote reporting of in the field changes in real time. Such changes could easily be keyed into the alerting system and generate the appropriate notifications to interested parties (primarily those maintaining SW).
Another potential benefit, the management buy-in of the value provided by SW. In large dispersed environments, communication is always a challenge. If such a group is already relying on SW for monitoring, it seems to like a natural fit to integrate a change Reporting feature. Such a feature could easily stand as it own product expansion, and provide an additional selling point for SW.