News

SolarWinds Network Management Refresh Adds SDN Monitoring

• By David Ramel
• 01/03/2019

SolarWinds announced a refresh of its network management offerings that adds monitoring of software-defined networking (SDN) systems, adding support for Cisco's ACI initiative and new anomaly detection capabilities.

The Austin, Texas-based IT management software specialist said its SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor helps customers monitor logical components of SDN environments such as APICs, tenants, application profiles, endpoint groups and physical entities.

The tool's site says it provides: multi-vendor network monitoring; Network Insights for deeper visibility; intelligent maps; NetPath and PerfStack for easy troubleshooting; smarter scalability for large environments; and advanced alerting.

Among the new features, the company called special attention to the new support for monitoring Cisco ACI environments, the networking giant's take on SDN and other game-changing network modernization technologies. Now, SolarWinds said, organizations can monitor logical and physical networks in Cisco ACI installations with one tool, tracking health scores for APIC tenants, spines and leaves.

Specific updates to the SolarWinds portfolio include:

• Network Performance Monitor (NPM) 12.4 -- Incorporates support for Cisco ACI to help users monitor the health of their Cisco Software-Defined Networking (SDN) deployments.
• Network Configuration Manager (NCM) 7.9 -- Introduces the ability to define and apply multi-device baselines or config snippets to any network node, and is designed to enhance the ability to quickly identify configuration drift and adhere to corporate configuration standards.
• NetFlow Traffic Analyzer (NTA) 4.5 -- Expanded alerting can help users act quickly if application traffic suddenly increases or decreases, as well as help speed resolution if a device stops sending flow data.
• IP Address Manager (IPAM) 4.8 -- Adds support for Infoblox to help users to monitor DHCP and DNS services in a centralized dashboard.

"Customers are sampling SDN in their dev-test environments, but with the maturation of the technology, we're seeing wider use by customers within their production environments," said SolarWinds exec Christoph Pfister. "Our users need comprehensive visibility into both the physical and logical networks. These latest updates are a direct reflection of our continued commitment to our user community and to their businesses -- all priced to be within reach for most companies and service providers."

Pricing for Network Performance Monitor starts at $2,995, its site says.