Review of SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor (NPM)
Review of SolarWinds NPM v10.4
Network Performance Monitor (NPM) is what I call the 'big
tackle'. I like its ability to zoom into network trouble spots,
and I appreciate the comprehensive range of check that it manages.
The first thing that Network Performance Monitor does is scour your environment
for computer
equipment that it can measure. NPM is designed to find all the
devices supplied by leading hardware vendors such as Cisco.
Once the Solarwinds
network monitoring software connects to the device it reports
factors such packet loss, latency, discards, CPU, and memory for either
SNMP or and WMI-enabled devices.
I am not the fastest installer, but it only took me an hour to get
the Network Performance Monitor working. For me, the most fun was
configuring intelligent alerting.
Remember, you can always get support from SolarWinds' experts
starting with the Thwack forum.
NPM is geared to detecting network outages caused by broken links
and faulty
equipment. Because it produces network-centric views, it's
intuitive to navigate and easy to evaluate what's working and what's not.
Perhaps the best feature of this
network monitor is the way it suggests solutions.
Moreover, if problems arise out of the blue, then you can configure NPM
to notify members
of your team what's changed and how to fix it.
Once the NPM v10.4 setup is complete then it's time to enjoy the
monitoring. I should not say this, but the greatest fun for a
techie is when something is wrong, but you can fix it easily.
With Orion NPM you start with a top-level network map and drill down
through the red dots to discover more about the symptoms. The cause of the
outage could be a broken physical link, a server that's offline, or an
application on a server that's run out of resources. Try it now!
By using SolarWinds NPM you will avoid amateur mistakes such as blaming
the network for latency problems, when it's really an
application on a server that is underlying cause. On a big
network a sub-contractor may have changed a router at a distant site, or
they patched a
server, only for the upgrade to cause a new far-reaching glitch.
Orion will help you detect and cure such problems.
Perhaps your company wiz-kid introduced a new VoIP or wireless
network, but did not realize the consequences for the rest of the
corporate network? Again NPM will soon troubleshoot the root
cause, and more than likely suggest solutions.
Often the most frustrating problems are those that appear only sporadically.
For these annoying intermittent challenges SolarWinds has an analyzer with retrospective
network-analysis capabilities. This historical data enables you to quickly
isolate and resolve the irregular network problem.
Summary: NPM will discover the worst performing
device on your network.
NPM Top 10 Lists No performance monitor
evaluation
could be complete without a mention of the top
ten lists. In fact, I find it mesmerising to observe how the nodes
change position and move in and out of the top 10. My favourite
category is response time, but you can also keep watch on:
Response Time (see screenshot right)
Wireless Clients by Traffic
Wireless APs by Client Count
Capacity
utilization
Memory usage
CPU load
Disk space volume
Network traffic and Packet Loss
I really enjoy customizing the lists so that
network monitoring works in just the way that I want.
Drill Downs It soon becomes second nature to double click on the network maps and
drill down through the site level to the server. From there you
can even examine the
resource usage of individual devices. However, you are newbie,
this ability to locate problems is awesome and it feels like being at
NASA's mission control in Houston Texas.
The Underlying Polling Technology Solarwinds
NPM ships with a MIB database that covers all common network
devices. However, if you do have a non-standard NPM allows
you to create a custom poller to monitor any SNMP-enabled device value
that has a MIB. As with so many of Orion's features, you can also
adjust how the module collects and reports on the data.
For those with wireless networks, version 10 now has an integrated Wireless Poller.
And for those with VMware, NPM reads host MIB information from
each VMware ESX server and its corresponding virtual machines.
Role-based Access Control Orion Network Performance Monitor (NPM) allows you to fine-tune who
sees what information. Typically, at HQ you want to see
everything, but perhaps you want the team at the Boston site to see only
their own servers, and not start interfering with the New York
operations. See also my review of
SolarWinds
SAM (Server & Application Monitor).
EnergyWise It would probably be over-playing your hand to say to your MD that energy
savings will pay for Orion NPM, but nevertheless, controlling the energy
consumption of Cisco EnergyWise-enabled network devices will reduce
costs, and could be a clincher in persuading the financial director to
buy Orion. For the techie it's just an interesting and worthwhile
challenge to reduce energy consumption and keep the server rooms cooler.
Free trial download of SolarWinds NPM v10.4
Time to Create Baselines
Creating baselines of network
activity is a good litmus tests of a well run company. Thus, one unexpected side-effect of using Orion NPM is that the techies
could have more time on their hands! As a manager you can take
advantage by commissioning them to show you baseline charts. The trouble with
fire-fighting is that you are never quite sure what is normal. By
having a 'feel' for the network backed up by stats for off-peak usage,
you can soon pin-point abnormalities. As a result you can either
prevent latency problems, or else cure them quickly before the users
realize there is something not quite right.
To support this pro-active approach to network management Orion
provides reports which are both comprehensive and interesting for the
techie. One common side-effect of baseline analysis is that ideas
for improvements
leap out of the charts, for example, load-balancing servers - one of my favourite
'cost nothing' tactics.
In this release the Solarwinds team have listened to user feedback and
incorporated these five features that so many have requested:
Hardware Health Monitoring
Drag-and-Discover Interactive Charting
Multiple Universal Device Pollers (UnDP) on the same chart
resource
Out-of-the-box polling support for F5 BIG-IP and HP wireless
MSM760/765 devices
Web Console User Auditing
Thwack Forum
Please note that SolarWinds are using your thwack posts as examples
because they're publicly available for us to point to, but they're not
the sole determiner of release content prioritization. We know you can't
access our minds or our internal feature tracking systems, but if you
could, you'd see we also take into account all the great feedback you've
given us in 1:1 interviews, feature requests submissions, beta posts,
through our support organization, etc. to help us decide what goes into
each release.
So, regardless of which method you prefer to provide us your
feedback, please keep it coming! SolarWinds are absolutely listening.
Join the NPM Thwack forum.
It's only fair to point out when reviewing SolarWinds performance monitors
is that the full package represents a big investment. Indeed, there are
cheaper performance monitoring packages, but they don't have the data
collection and storage capacity of Orion NPM v10.4. Actually, my
biggest discriminator in determining whether a product is cheap or
expensive is the quality of the support staff. Some people say
Orion is expensive, but nobody complains about the troubleshooting
skills of Orion's technical staff.
More good news is that SolarWinds offer of a trial version of NPM v10.4 so that you can see if this performance monitor really would save you money in the
long run. Another way of reducing costs is to select only the NPM
modules that you need. Once you see the benefits, particularly if
you are trying to track multiple sites, then it's easy to justifying
adding more options later.
There are cheaper alternatives to each Orion module, but one hidden
benefit of Orion is that all the modules integrate with each other,
which makes it so much easier for reporting and root cause analysis.
Also most rival products don't supply the level of detail that you get by drilling
down through the network maps.
Log & Event Manager (LEM)
If you are looking for an application that can provide
automatic reaction to events, then check-out another of SolarWinds' apps
namely the Log & Event Manager. In addition to analyzing logs from
routers, anti-virus software and Windows logs on the servers, LEM can
also help you achieve IT
compliance. Review
SolarWinds LEM
Operating Systems for Orion: Windows 2003, 2008
and 2012 Server,
including R2 (32-bit or 64-bit). Please note, that you also need to install IIS and .NET Framework 3.5
Resources: CPU Speed: 3.0 GHz; Hard Drive Space: 30 GB; Memory: 4 GB
Database: SQL Server 2005 SP1, or SQL Server 2008 (Express,
Standard, or Enterprise)
Summary: Review of SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor
NPM is ideal for discovering network
trouble spots. When I tested the NPM I was surprised how much there
was to learn about network technologies, fortunately the SolarWinds
performance monitor helped me
understand an appreciate how devices communicate. In a nutshell
NPM helps you detect problems before they develop into a full-scale
company-wide outage.
It took me 90 minutes to setup NPM, however, most experts take less than
an hour to get started. How long will it take you?
Full Reviews of the SolarWinds Licenced Family of Applications
Here are Guy's comprehensive evaluations, comments and recommendations for
SolarWinds licensed products. Each application offers a 30 day trial of a fully
functional program, so check out the download links provided.
Guy Recommends:
SolarWinds' NPM - Network Performance Monitor
SolarWinds' performance monitor is designed for detecting network outages,
making it easy to see what's working, and what needs your attention.
This utility guides you through creating network maps; it also helps
identifying whether the
root cause is faulty equipment, or resource overload. Give NPM a try.
