SolarWinds makes powerful network monitoring accessible to masses

SolarWinds has announced further enhancements to SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor (NPM) that offer the robust network performance monitoring, alerting and reporting capabilities available in ‘Big Four’ enterprise software, but at an affordable, unique-to-industry price. The latest SolarWinds NPM demonstrates a continued commitment to simplifying network management in the datacentre amidst increasingly complex network challenges.

“SolarWinds focuses on developing products that solve the everyday needs of all IT Professionals – most of whom don’t have deep pockets or time to spare installing or configuring software,” said Chris LaPoint, VP Product Management, SolarWinds. “And as technology advances and networks grow increasingly complex, SolarWinds must preserve our long-standing tradition of providing the powerful capabilities of enterprise-level software you might see in expensive ‘Big Four’ software, but without the need for professional services and at a price that nearly any organisation can afford.”

In keeping with the tradition of delivering advanced functionality at a market-differentiating price, SolarWinds NPM has added new baseline threshold calculating functionality, providing the deep visibility and advanced analytics not previously available to network administrators at such a price. Other features SolarWinds NPM was previously first to introduce to the market for a low cost include enterprise-level wireless support for LAN controllers and thin access points, monitoring for major routing protocols including OSPF and BGP, and a high-availability Failover Engine, all of which have differentiated SolarWinds NPM as a uniquely powerful, yet affordable, network monitoring solution.

New SolarWinds NPM Features
· Dynamic baseline threshold calculation defines critical network device thresholds based on historical network performance data, enabling users to configure alerts simply and accurately. It automatically gathers baseline data for specified time intervals (weekly or daily) to determine normal operating parameters and calculates thresholds with relevant alerts – good, warning, critical, or down – which allow IT Pros to quickly assess whether a device is up and performing poorly or is about to fail.
· Custom NOC views provide the ability to easily configure and display real-time fault, performance, and availability dashboards tailored to the needs of a network operations centre (NOC) of any size.
· Dynamic customisable network mapping enables IT Pros to drag and drop network devices into network maps and automatically view real-time and colour-coded link utilisation for fully customised and detailed insight into network health beyond up-down status. The Network Weather Map’s dynamic link utilisation helps IT Pros identify when the network is approaching critical thresholds so they can prevent network errors and downtime.
· Enhancements to the universal device poller feature allow users to easily add a CPU and memory utilisation chart in the SolarWinds NPM dashboard for additional uncommon devices, and includes those new device statistics in monitoring and reporting.
· Support for additional routing protocols and added support for Ruckus and Motorola wireless controllers and devices enable broader network monitoring for IT Pros.
SolarWinds continues to engage with the vast IT Pro community to understand their challenges and needs and to develop software that reflects those needs. thwack is SolarWinds’ online community of over 130,000* IT Pros who share content, ask and answer questions, and request and vote on new SolarWinds product features.

“thwack is second to none,” said Ashley Cotter, applications engineer for Timico who evaluated an early version of SolarWinds NPM’s latest features. “I voted for the new baseline threshold alerting and it’s now included in the software. I can ask SolarWinds senior developers technical questions on a peer level and I know I’m actively impacting SolarWinds product development, and that’s just not something I’ve seen anywhere else.”