Solarwinds releases Network Performance Manager 12

Monitoring and management software company Solarwinds has announced the release of Network Performance Monitor 12 – a release that includes their most significant updates in the history of the product.  Originally known as Orion, NPM is a comprehensive network monitoring and management tool.  The new release features to major new features known as NetPath and Network Insight.

NetPath is a feature that visually maps hybrid network paths.  It gives IT pros the ability to track down and pinpoint performance issues in their environments, including cloud-based applications.  The feature is able to diagnose where the issues are occurring on the internal network, with the WAN provider and in the cloud applications own network.  This sort of feedback should assist network administrators in faster resolutions to complicated network problems.

Marketing materials for NPM 12 list the following six features of NetPath:

• Dynamic and visual hop-by-hop analysis of critical paths and devices along the entire network delivery path—on-premises, in the cloud or across hybrid IT environments.
• Specific, actionable information to resolve network issues regardless of network ownership.
• Automatic and dynamic thresholds to identify unhealthy critical paths and network nodes, providing an estimated 50 percent faster time to resolution.
• Visualized critical path performance over time for historical views of network latency.
• Identification of device configuration changes along critical paths when integrated with SolarWinds Network Configuration Manager.
• Immediate insight into the traffic travelling across flow-enabled devices impacting network performance when integrated with SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer.

In addition to NetPath, NPM 12 is also introducing a feature called Network Insight.  The feature is an in-depth monitoring for load balancers.  Initially available for F5 BigIP installations, Solarwinds expects to adopt additional load balancing and application delivery platforms in the future.

Network Performance Monitor 12 also includes a refreshed user interface that has been modernized.  All of the additions, including video tutorials, are covered on the Solarwinds website.

These feature join a bevy of network monitoring capabilities in the product.  NPM has a long list of capabilities for managing both wired and wireless networks.  These include automatic discovery for your network devices, monitoring of a long list of known problem conditions, dashboards and summaries and maps of network locations for multi-site environments.  The system monitors relationships and links between network devices, monitoring for error conditions and latency.

Network Performance Monitor 12 is available today at a starting price of $2,895.  For more information, see the Solarwinds website.