* Tool enhancements aim to boost monitoring of WAN links across distributed enterprises
Understanding what’s happening on WAN connections is going to get a whole lot hairier as enterprises begin centralizing data in private cloud computing infrastructures or increasing their reliance on applications delivered as services across the network. The deeper the insight into those connections, the better off network managers will be in keeping application performance at acceptable levels.
With this imperative in mind, SolarWinds recently updated two core WAN performance and networking monitoring tools, Orion IP SLA Manager and Orion NetFlow Traffic Analyzer (NTA). With these latest releases, the company provides support for additional operations and increased visibility into network data.
“It’s not that this data couldn’t be gathered previously; the data is there, and people can always go get it. These tools are about how network engineers can consume data so that it’s useful and meaningful in how they do their jobs every day,” says Sanjay Castelino, vice president of product management for SolarWinds.
For example, the latest version of Orion NTA, v3.7, includes an improved traffic analysis capability called Interface Alerts with Top Talker Details. With this feature, NTA issues an alert when a specific interface exceeds a predefined threshold. Using details of the top talkers provided in the alert, they can identify bottlenecks before a remote site is affected, the company says.
For its use, Infor, a business software maker in Alpharetta, Ga., exploits the addition of enhanced graphing, which permits rapid switching between overall data rates, percentage of total traffic and percentage of total bandwidth; pre-built summary views of top receivers and top transmitters; and rapid searching of endpoints and applications enterprise wide, says Geof Newton, senior technical specialist at the company.
“The key benefit that NTA brings Infor is the ability to go beyond simple wide-area network utilization graphs and immediately see what applications and users make up that utilization. NTA also helps us locate rogue systems or processes which are placing unnecessary demands on the network,” he adds.
With Orion IP SLA Manager v3.5, SolarWinds adds support for two Cisco IP SLA operations, ICMP Path Echo and ICMP Path Jitter. These provide insight into the response time and interpacket delays along a given trace route network path. Users now have more than a dozen operations they can monitor from the perspective of each remote site, Castelino says.
In addition, this Orion tool now will automatically discover operations that users have created on their own. “This feature is good for customers who set up IP SLA operations by hand prior to buying our products. We couldn’t consume those operations before, but now we can,” he says.
These latest releases, which work with the Orion Network Performance Monitor (NPM) platform, are available now. Pricing for Orion NTA starts at $1,795 and at $1,495 for Orion IP SLA. Base price for Orion NPM is $2,475.
