SolarWinds has 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 endusers expect and businesses need in today’s on-demand environments.

“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.”

According to the most recent SolarWinds IT Trends Report, 87% of organizations have migrated some infrastructure to the cloud, yet 60% 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 organizations 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% faster time to resolution
  • Visualized 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:

  • Visualization of entire load balancing environments
  • Graphical display of relationships and component status
  • Visualization 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.