Orion Network Performance Monitor (NPM) is what I call the 'big
tackle'. Big in its power to zoom into network trouble spots, and
big in the comprehensive range of checks that it manages. If you
are reviewing performance monitors, then take advantage of Solarwinds
offer to
download a free trial of Orion NPM 9.5.
Orion 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 see what's working and what's not.
Perhaps Orion's best feature is the way it suggests solutions.
Moreover, if problems arise out of the blue, then you can configure Orion
to notify members
of your team what's changed and how to fix it.
Please note: Orion NPM is not so easy to setup for a network beginner.
However, your internal network expert will have no trouble installing,
and there is always external support available from Solarwinds' experts.
Once the Orion NPM 9.5 setup is complete then it's time to enjoy the
monitoring. I should not say this, but the greatest fun for the
techie is when something is wrong and you can perform an easy fix.
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.
Free download of Orion NPM 9.5
By using Orion 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 Orion 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 Orion has an analyzer with retrospective
network-analysis capabilities. This historical data enables you to quickly
isolate and resolve the irregular network problem.
No review of Orion NPM would be complete without 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 Orion
monitors 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 Orion NPM ships
with a MIB database that covers all common network
devices. However, if you do have a non-standard Orion 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 9.5 now has an integrated Wireless Poller.
And for those with VMware, Orion 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.
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 download of Orion NPM 9.5
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.
It's fair to say that in reviewing performance monitors the full
Orion NPM 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 9.5. 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 Orion
NPM 9.5 to see if this performance monitor 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 Orion Network maps.