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IT management software specialist SolarWinds announced the latest release of its Network Performance Monitor (NPM), the company’s flagship network performance monitoring platform.
The new edition adds enterprise-class deep packet inspection (DPI) and analysis technology to troubleshoot network performance on application latency.
The NPM provides a view of network fault, performance, availability, traffic and latency by continuously monitoring packets across the wire and inspecting, identifying and classifying application traffic for more than 1,200 applications such as Skype, YouTube and Microsoft Lync.
“Network performance monitoring significantly improves the availability of business critical applications and services by ensuring the availability of the network infrastructure they run on,” Brad Hale, the product marketing principal for network management at SolarWinds, told eWEEK. “Whether it’s VOIP, e-commerce, or CRM—just to name a few—these services have a direct impact on the bottom line. When the network is not available, productivity and revenue is significantly impacted.”
The solution also displays network and application response time in easy-view charts and graphs and complements the power of flow-based technologies like NetFlow, sFlow and J-Flow with DPI technology.
“IT budgets are stretched thin, but that simply means organizations need to make the most out of limited resources by minimizing downtime and maximizing the performance of their existing infrastructure,” Hale said. “The cost to a business in lost productivity and revenue generating activities pales in comparison to the cost of network monitoring.”
Data collected for items other than interfaces, nodes and volumes is effectively free, and users can monitor as many as the system can handle.
Hale pointed out a few examples of other data types that can be monitored, including central processing unit (CPU) statistics, memory statistics and power supplies.
“Network services are as critical to small businesses as they are to large enterprises. Unfortunately, most small businesses have neither been able to afford advanced monitoring services such as deep packet inspection nor had the expertise in-house to implement it,” he said. “SolarWinds is bringing affordable and easy-to-use DPI to small business owners so they, too, can monitor business critical applications and services in a way that will help them thrive in the new app-centric world.”
In addition to providing insight into how the network impacts application performance, SolarWinds offers a host of integrated products to help IT pros connect the dots between the full application stack–the connections between the application and all of software, middleware and extended infrastructure that the application requires for performance.
In June, the company acquired Pingdom, a provider of Website monitoring and performance management solutions.
The acquisition is part of SolarWinds’ strategy to expand beyond its traditional on-premise IT management stronghold to support the evolution of performance management from on-premise IT, to IT as a service, and to IT in the cloud.