Introduction to Solarwinds
SolarWinds Server and Application Monitors (SAM) monitors the health and performance of multi-vendor servers. Monitor server response time, packet loss, and network latency.
Solarwinds Network performance monitoring is the process of visualizing, monitoring, optimizing, troubleshooting and reporting on the service quality of your network as experienced by your users. Everything you do on a network requires packets; it carries data around.
Basic Things you will Study in this Tutorial:
Features
Installation
Benefits
Maps in orion Features
Fault, performance, and availability monitoring.
Hop-by-hop analysis along critical paths.
Cross-stack network data correlation.
Customizable topology and dependency-aware intelligent alerts.
Dynamic wired and wireless network discovery and mapping.
Installation
To install SolarWinds NPM, please follow the SolarWinds Orion Installer instructions.
System requirements and preparing your environment
Gathering credentials
Preparing your environment
The single installer allows you to install all SolarWinds products available on the Orion Platform. You might also consider evaluating the following products, which are often chosen by our customers to complement SolarWinds NPM:
Netflow Traffic Analyzer – Network traffic analyzer and bandwidth monitoring software.
Network Configuration Manager – Automated network configuration and compliance management, configuration backup, vulnerability assessment, and firmware updates.
Server and Application Monitor – Monitoring the performance, capacity, and health of Linux and Windows applications across data centers, remote offices, and the cloud.
Value of a network monitoring solution
Benefits ultimately come down to:
Cost savings
Avoiding unexpected remediation efforts
Benefits:
Salary/Staff Time Savings
Today’s advanced networks need extremely trained network professionals to take care of the network, configure new users, respond to support calls, and plan and support network expansions and changes. Automated technology that helps maintain or maybe scale back head count offers a directly quantifiable come. In most cases, network management and monitoring solutions free network professionals will keep effort on a lot of strategic projects, which might facilitate to reduce prices and drive redoubled revenue.
Reduced Network Downtime
Network Downtime may be directly quantified by merely calculative the price of the time a network professional spends troubleshooting and resolution the reason for the downtime. This cost, however, is simply the tip of the iceberg as so much because the total price of network downtime is concerned. Lost worker productivity, lost revenue, and lost client goodwill are all samples of prices those are hard to calculate however have a far bigger impact.
Reduction in Support Calls
Network management and monitoring solutions alert
network management and support teams to potential issues before users begin to
complain and generate support calls. The price of support calls are often
simply calculated by observing the quantity of calls per week, the time to
resolve a support call, and therefore the value per hour of support time. By
reducing the quantity of support calls through proactive monitoring and
management of the network, you may be ready to directly quantify the price
savings.
•Decreased Time to Resolution
Time to resolution is that the quantity of your time that it takes to resolve an issue once the network professional is notified. Network monitoring and management systems with real time diagnostic information that is viewable through dynamic network maps can greatly scale back the quantity of your time needed to troubleshoot and pinpoint the source of the issue.
Managing Service Level Agreements
Network operations teams are typically held to generally or measured against a quantitative service level agreement (SLA) that’s generally a percent of network uptime. This SLA may be an interior SLA or an external SLA along with your service provider, as an example. If network convenience is directly attribute to a company’s revenue, then the value of down time may be simply measured based on the average revenue that may generated during the downtime.
Network Insight
Beyond the basic monitoring data, SolarWinds NPM offers deeper integration into selected brands of devices. Usually combining functionalities across multiple products in the Orion Platform, we offer these features as Network Insight.
Network Insight for Cisco Nexus: It provides insight into the health of your Nexus devices and visibility into your virtual port channels (vPCs). It also automates the management of your Nexus infrastructure to help ensure service availability.
Network Insight for Cisco ASA: It automates the monitoring and management of your ASA firewall infrastructure. Monitor health and performance of the ASA, get visibility into VPN tunnel connectivity, and analyze access control lists (ACLs). Identify shadowed and redundant rules.
Network Insight for F5 BIG-IP: It provides comprehensive monitoring for the F5 BIG-IP family of load balancers.
Maps in Orion
Orion Maps is a sophisticated troubleshooting tool that gives a contextual and graphical portrayal of an entity, as well as nodes, interfaces, volumes, and groups, and it’s critical relationships. It visualizes physical and logical relationships between entities, leveraging Network Performance Monitor’s Topology, Server and Application Monitor’s Application Dependencies, and different relationship information to quickly and simply isolate and identify critical health and performance problems. Maps seem on a canvas, specializing in the seed entity from which you came. Every map is interactive, and hovering over or clicking on any component of a map brings that entity and its relationships to the forefront.
Alerts and Reports
The most common task of a monitoring product is to draw the user’s attention to a problematic space of their network that needs action. Alerts, once came upon properly, are the best way to go about it. NPM comes with many predefined alerts for common issues like a nodes going down, high interface utilization, packet loss, and many more. several predefined alerts are enabled by default, therefore if there are issues, you are alerted as before long as you discover your network and add discovered devices to SolarWinds NPM. Reports for all Orion Platform products are set on the main menu under Reports. There, you can see a listing of predefined reports, customise the predefined reports, or create your own reports. you can additionally manage their delivery schedule.
Free Network Monitoring Tools
Nagios Core – Nagios is the great-grand-daddy of monitoring tools, with only ping being more ubiquitous in some circles.
- Cacti.
- Zabbix.
- ntop.
- Icinga.
- Spiceworks.
- Observium Community.
- Wireshark.
