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. Â It gives IT pros the ability to track down and pinpoint performance issues in their environments, including cloud-based applications. Â 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. Â 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. Â The feature is an in-depth monitoring for load balancers. Â 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. Â 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. Â NPM has a long list of capabilities for managing both wired and wireless networks. Â 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. Â 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. Â For more information, see the Solarwinds website.
