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Hello, my name is Jeff Blank and I'm a Sales Engineer here at SolarWinds.
In this guided tour,
I'll be demonstrating the SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor, or NPM
for short.
NPM is an advanced Network Monitoring System that provides users with fault
tolerance, performance metrics,
and hardware health statistics for their networking equipment.
NPM gathers this information by leveraging ICMP,
SNMP
and WMI protocols.
When you first install NPM
the built-in network discovery will dynamically discover switches,
routers, firewalls, wireless access points, servers, or any other SNMP-enabled
device across a wide range of manufacturers.
NPM automatically discovers new devices that are added to your network
and prompt you for monitoring.
In addition, NPM's discovery central
will automatically discover the virtual infrastructure of your network including
vCenters,
datacenters, clusters,
ESX hosts, virtual machines and Hyper-V machines.
Once the information is obtained, you will be able to filter the results of your
prior to import. For example, you could filter based on interface
type or hardware information.
NPM is accessed through a customizable web-console, so users have the ability
to monitor their network from virtually any location.
The product also includes an advanced alert manager,
report writer tool,
network mapping application, network atlas, syslog & SNMP trap server,
grouping and dependencies,
universal device poller and much more.
Now that we have outlined some of the key features of NPM let's walk through a
quick demonstration of the solution.
The first page that users come to when accessing the NPM web console is the
Summary page.
The Summary page gives you a high-level overview of the network health,
and allows users to quickly identify any problems within their environment.
The All Nodes resource
will give you a list of all of the nodes that you are currently monitoring, as well
as their current status.
You can expand any of the groupings for a complete list of devices
and hover over an interface for additional node details.
Nodes can be grouped by vendor, machine type, location, or by any custom
properties as defined by the user.
As you can see, there are several objects that need attention; identified by the
red or yellow coloring of the objects.
Below this resource you can also see any Active Alerts that have been triggered
by the system.
Generally you would also have received notification, via SMS or email;
letting you know that there was a problem.
NPM's Network Atlas with ConnectNow,
gives you the ability to create a customizable network maps
that visually displays your network and node status.
You can import custom image files
allowing you to display your network environment in a wide range of views
from high-level global perspective,
down to the device level.
For teams of network administrators, NPM also offers the ability to create a custom
resource displaying an audit trail of user events,
such as logons and adding or removing of nodes.
Now let's drill down into a node details view to get more information about a
specific network device.
As you can see on the Node Details page for this Cisco 3750, there is
a left tabbing system that allows you to customize the page related to the device.
In this demo, there is a Summary tab, a Vital Stats tab, and Network tab;
each containing different metrics about this 3750.
On the Summary Tab, by default,
you'll get information on the Node Details consisting of status,
machine type,
operating system,
availability statistics,
polling details,
as well as audit events associated with this particular device.
On the Vital Stats tab, you will see radial gauges displaying average response time,
packet loss,
and CPU and memory usage.
NPM includes an interactive drag-and-discover charting capability
that accelerates troubleshooting using a draggable chart timeline,
the ability to mouse over a single data point for greater detail,
one-click zoom,
and one-click series selection.
Charts can easily be exported to either XLS or HTML format directly from the
web console.
Clicking on the Network tab provides you with topology information.
Network Performance Monitor collects Layer 2,
Layer 3,
CDP & LLDP information to identify how things are connected within the
network.
This information is also used within the Network Atlas
to help you quickly create network maps.
You can also see hardware health information about the device including
fan and power supply status.
Additionally,
you can see a list of interfaces and their current traffic
in the Current Percent Utilization of Each Interface resource.
Of course you also have the ability to create your own custom tabs, letting you
define device-specific custom views with data and resources tailored to your
environment.
Clicking on the "Add Resource" button provides an extensive list of all available
resources options.
Let's click on an interface and check out the Interface Details view.
The Interface Details page is similar to what you've just seen in the Node
Details page, providing you with specific data associated with a single
interface.
From here you can see the current receive and transmit utilization in the radial
gauges on the left,
and detailed information about the interface and its status can be found
below the gauges.
Some of this information includes; interface type,
bandwidth, and status.
On the right side of the Interface details you'll find the interactive
charts that are providing historical and trending information.
Here we have the Min/Max/Average bps In/Out,
the Percent Utilization,
In/Out Errors and Discards,
Total Bytes Transferred,
and Min/Max/Average packets In/Out.
Just as before,
you can easily zero in on specific data in the chart,
and zoom to specific time ranges with a single click.
By selecting the Network tab on a layer 3 device or router, you will be
provided with a number of resources for monitoring and troubleshooting network
route related issues.
NPM monitors OSPF, BGP
and RIP routing protocols. Each router that is detected by NPM will display
information including topology,
routing table details, flapping routes, and interface utilization.
NPM includes a Top 10 Flapping Routes resource that will provide you with
information about nodes, impacted destinations, the next hop device,
protocol, and the last change.
You can use this resource to check interface details to identify problem
areas.
The Default Route change resource gives you a historical account of route changes
that have occurred as far back as 30 days. With NPM, you can automatically
detect, import and monitor multicast groups and applications.
Here you will see Top 10 Multicast Traffic and group resources.
Simply select one of the multicast nodes and you will see node details such as
Group Membership
Group Summary,
Interfaces, Traffic and Utilization.
Drill down into a group for group details, interfaces, members, and multicast
topology.
On the Group Summary page we have a list of groups that have been created by the
user.
NPM allows you to create groups and dependencies that enable you to more
effectively manage your network.
Groups give you the ability to logically organize monitored objects,
regardless of device type or location.
These groups can be created manually or
automatically using dynamic queries.
Dependencies allow you to more faithfully represent what can actually
be known about your network, eliminating "false positive" alert triggers and
providing more accurate insight into the state of your network.
In essence,
this lets you establish the parent-child relationships of your core and downstream
devices.
On the Top 10 page you will find a wealth of resources which provide Top N
reporting on various metrics across the network.
This page makes it very easy to identify over utilized interfaces
or interfaces with high amounts of errors or discards.
All of the resources on the Top 10 page can be modified or filtered to show
specific objects,
or groups of objects.
In addition to monitoring wired network devices, NPM monitors both thin and
thick wireless access points from Aruba, Cisco,
HP and Meru.
These wireless devices can be grouped by vendor, machine type, location
or a variety of different criteria.
And taking it one step further,
you can get a view of all the wireless clients that are currently connected.
The Network Performance Monitor
also provides users with views about specific events occurring with the NMS,
received Syslog and Traps and any Alerts that have been triggered by the system.
NPM includes a powerful alert engine
with a number of out-of-the-box alerts.
These can be customized to create your own intelligent alerts
based on user-defined thresholds,
and respond to hundreds of different network scenarios.
Alerts can include multiple condition checks,
device dependencies and support for alert suppression.
Alerts can be escalated automatically and delivered through more than 16
built-in delivery methods including email,
text messages,
SNMP traps
or the launching of an external application.
From the web console, users have the ability to acknowledge active alerts, as
well as add notes.
In addition to advanced alerts, Orion NPM also ships with over 100
pre-defined reports that can be accessed from the Reports page and exported or
emailed on a scheduled basis.
From the Reports page you can see a list of reports available to the user
and can drill down to view the report from within the web-console.
If one of those reports does not meet your needs
then you can easily create a custom report
using the built-in report writer
or import one
of the many reports available on thwack,
SolarWinds online community.
For more detailed information on NPM and a free 30-day evaluation,
please contact sales at www.solarwinds.com.