OREANDA-NEWS. SolarWinds, a leading provider of powerful and affordable IT management software, today announced a revolutionary release of the network administrator's trusted tool, SolarWinds® Network Performance Monitor (NPM). With the release of SolarWinds NPM 12, the company's flagship product and award-winning tool relied on by tens of thousands of IT departments now features NetPath™ and Network Insight. For the first time, these two new capabilities give network administrators the hybrid IT visual insights and analysis needed for visibility into the performance of services across not only the networks they own -- but those of their service providers and cloud vendors as well. These innovations empower IT professionals to provide the application performance end users expect and businesses need in today's on-demand environments. 

According to the most recent SolarWinds IT Trends Report, 89 percent of UK organisations have migrated some infrastructure to the cloud, yet 65 percent state they will likely never transition all services offsite, making hybrid IT the reality for the foreseeable future. In such complex hybrid IT environments, network administrators need the ability to view the performance details of and pinpoint bottlenecks on all the networks connecting critical services and applications, whether they be on-premises or in the cloud. 

The addition of NetPath makes SolarWinds NPM 12 the only network monitoring software that visually maps hybrid network paths alongside on-premises data. For example, NetPath gives IT professionals whose organisations use cloud-based applications such as Salesforce® the ability to identify the exact location of a performance issue -- whether on the internal LAN, with a WAN provider or on the cloud application vendor's own network -- and provides actionable insights for resolution. Specific NetPath features include: 

·     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.

·     Visualised 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. 

While NetPath provides breadth of visibility, Network Insight provides depth by enabling comprehensive monitoring of load balancing environments that empowers IT professionals with deeper network intelligence, including dynamic and visual insight into the performance of applications and service delivery. Specific Network Insight features include: 

·     Visualisation of entire load balancing environments.

·     Graphical display of relationships and component status.

·     Visualisation of component details in a single console. 

Network Insight is currently available for F5® BIG-IP® environments, with support for additional appliances expected in future releases. 

Quotes 

"Applications, whether on-premises or in the cloud, are the heart of business, but they're useless without the networks that connect them to end users," said Christoph Pfister, executive vice president of products, SolarWinds. "Until now, the capabilities to monitor the performance of those networks regardless of ownership were impossible within a single tool -- traceroute tools are typically blocked from accessing service provider networks, and cloud monitoring tools don't have adequate visibility into on-premises infrastructure performance. With NetPath and Network Insight, SolarWinds NPM 12 is delivering the dynamic visibility and actionable insights IT professionals need to effectively manage all the networks impacting the applications their organizations rely on in a hybrid IT world -- every node, every path, every network." 

"SolarWinds NPM is the foundation of the monitoring service we deliver to our geographically distributed enterprise," said Joshua Biggley, Engineer, Enterprise Applications, Cardinal Health. "The out-of-the-box simplicity means that monitoring CPU, memory, volumes and interfaces, whether physical or virtual, is easy. With NPM 12 delivering functionality like the expanded support for F5 load balancers and switch stack monitoring, we're ready to deliver better visibility into our global network. The introduction of NetPath is literally turning our monitoring service on its head. As we push more infrastructure to the cloud as well as both SaaS and PaaS solutions, NetPath will give us the insights we need to see connectivity performance from our network to the outside world, and from regionally distributed monitoring points into our datacenter-hosted services." 

"Network monitoring that provides simplicity and intuitive visualisation of our entire network, even the critical paths that involve a cloud service provider; quick time to resolution; and not needing an army of engineers to maintain is very important to us," said Allistair Griffith, NOC Administrator, FLOW Jamaica. "SolarWinds NPM 12 provides just that, and in a package that will scale with us as we continue to grow. SolarWinds NPM with NetPath and Network Insight is a game-changer." 

"NetPath helps solve one of the network manager's most pressing needs: end-to-end network visibility on-premises, in the cloud or across hybrid networks," said Shamus McGillicuddy, senior analyst, Enterprise Management Associates. 

About SolarWinds

SolarWinds provides powerful and affordable IT management software to customers worldwide from Fortune 500® enterprises to small businesses, government agencies and educational institutions. We are committed to focusing exclusively on IT Pros, and strive to eliminate the complexity that they have been forced to accept from traditional enterprise software vendors. Regardless of where the IT asset or user sits, SolarWinds delivers products that are easy to find, buy, use, maintain, and scale while providing the power to address all key areas of the infrastructure from on premises to the Cloud. Our solutions are rooted in our deep connection to our user base, which interacts in our THWACK online community to solve problems, share technology and best practices, and directly participate in our product development process.