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Today, I am going to give you an overview of SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor
or NPM. NPM makes it easy to quickly detect, diagnose, and resolve network
performance issues by delivering real-time views and dashboards
that enable you to visually track network performance at a glance.
NPM uses a quick do-it-yourself deployment that generally gets you up
and monitoring in less than an hour using a simple wizard interface and three
easy steps.
Let's go ahead and get started.
NPM simplifies network troubleshooting with a web interface that is logical, useable,
customizable,
interactive, and drill-down and allows you to manage by exception and focus on
highlighted issues that cross pre-defined thresholds.
Network performance data can be viewed in customizable graphs, tables,
maps, and top 10 lists.
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
right out-of-the box so you can start monitoring immediatel
in a fully customizable web interface.
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
NPM's main Summary page provides a number of resources so you can visually
track network performance at a glance.
The Nodes Managed 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 a number of other criteria.
NPM's Network Atlas with connect now gives you the ability to
automatically create a customizable network map
that visually displays your network and node status.
NPM provides an out-of-the-box Top 10 dashboard that shows at a glance
where you have issues on the network.
Again,
you can see that you can hover over an interface for a summary
or drill down for a Node Details Summary page.
The Node Detail summary page allows you to edit and manage the node details,
view polling details,
active alerts,
availability statistics and more.
The Vital Stats tab provides interactive charting capabilities to go along with
node performance metrics such as response time,
packet loss, CPU load, and memory utilization.
NPM includes an innovative drag-and-discover interactive 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.
The Network tab provides interactive resources with information about
interface utilization,
connections, throughput and hardware health data including fan speed, sensor
temperatures or power supply consumption and status.
NPM can monitor OSPF,
BGP, and RIP routing protocols and display routing table details, routing
neighbors, flapping routes, and route changes,
all useful resources when troubleshooting network route-related
issues.
With NPM, you can automatically detect, import and monitor multicast groups and
applications.
Here you will see Top 10 Multicast Traffic and groups resources.
Simply select one of the multicast nodes and you will see node details such as group
membership,
group summary,
interfaces, traffic, and utilization.
You can then drill down into a group for group details, interfaces, members, and
multicast topology.
NPM includes a powerful alert engine that includes a number of out-of-the box
alerts
that can be customized you can create your own intelligent alerts to respond
to hundreds of different network scenarios,
including multiple condition checks,
device dependencies
and support for alert suppression.
Alerts can be escalated automatically and delivered through more than sixteen
built-in delivery methods including email,
text messages,
SNMP traps,
or the launching of an external application.
Once you have enabled your alerts, you can filter and view all all triggered alerts
by device or filter name in the Alerts view.
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.
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,
and 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.
NPM also includes a built in high performance syslog server and event
handler.
Events,
alerts, syslog messages,
traps and audit events can be filtered and displayed in NPM's Message Center.
NPM ships with a number of out-of-the box performance reports
that can be printed or exported to a pdf.
If one of those reports does not meet your needs
then you can easily create a custom reports using the built-in report writer
or import or import one of the many reports available on thwack,
SolarWinds online user community.
SolarWinds offers a free, fully functional, 30-day trial of Network
Performance Monitor that you can download at www.solarwinds.com so you can try it in
your network environment and see just how powerful and easy-to-use it is to use.