Solarwinds Network Performance Monitor
Stetson Saenz
Monitor, analyze, diagnose, and optimize database performance and DataOps that drive your business-critical applications. Unify on-premises and cloud database visibility, control, and management with streamlined monitoring, data integration, and tuning across multiple vendors.
Modernize your service desk with intelligent and automated ticketing, asset, configuration, and service-level agreement (SLA) management; a knowledge base; and a self-service portal with secure remote assistance. SolarWinds offers an easy-to-use IT service management (ITSM) platform designed to meet your service management needs to maximize productivity while adhering to ITIL best practices.
Ensure user experience with unified performance monitoring, tracing, and metrics across applications, clouds, and SaaS. Robust solutions offering rich visualization, synthetic and real user monitoring (RUM), and extensive log management, alerting, and analytics to expedite troubleshooting and reporting.
Reduce attack surface, manage access, and improve compliance with IT security solutions designed for accelerated time-to-value ranging from security event management, access rights management, identity monitoring, server configuration monitoring and patching, and secure gateway and file transfer.
You can use network monitoring systems to automate the most time-consuming and labor-intensive aspects of network monitoring, maximize your time and effort, and uncover key insights you might have missed with manual network monitoring.
Beyond that, network monitoring comes down to keeping an eye on key metrics, using a network monitoring system to help you perform sophisticated analysis, and diligently following network monitoring best practices.
SolarWinds was founded by IT professionals solving complex problems in the simplest way, and we have carried that spirit forward since 1999. We take pride in relentlessly listening to our customers to develop a deeper understanding of the challenges they face. Our digital agility solutions are built to help companies of any size accelerate business transformation today and into the future.
We purchased the NPM SL100 to monitor our Juniper ex3300-48p switches. There is about 30 switches total. There are 10 stacks. However when I run through the setup I can only monitor a very small part of the switch information. The representative told me I could monitor all the information I needed from the SL100. Any ideas on best things to monitor on switches? If I put all content then it shows 941 over the limit of 100.
The SL100 lets you monitor 100 "elements" (100 interfaces, 100 volumes, and 100 nodes). It may not be big enough to let you monitor all interfaces on even a single node. This is because a node may have many interfaces. If you want or need to monitor more than 100 Interfaces, there are things you're going to have to prioritize. What interfaces to monitor, what to let go. Fortunately, NPM will get you a LOT of information by monitoring a node with SNMP.
I'm a Network Analyst; the vast majority of my Solarwinds elements point at interfaces, but I'm also concerned with seeing all the monitorable parts of switches and routers and firewalls. My SysAdmins take care of the servers, so I monitor those devices' volumes out of interest, and to provide a reality check against the SysAdmins' monitoring of the volumes with their own tools.
An element is something Solarwinds monitors. One of my nodes can contain MANY elements (especially interfaces)--and you may wish to monitor some--or ALL of them. Or you might choose to monitor none of the interfaces (or only 100), and just rely on ICMP response for some nodes--ones which you're content to simply know if they're up or down, when you don't care about their internal stats or temperatures or volume sizes, etc. But it's nice to know you can monitor all of your switches as "nodes" AND still have room to monitor servers and UPS's and other devices as "nodes" too.
Some of my chassis switches (which are each "nodes") might have 500 elements within them--one for every physical port (384 per chassis). But the "node" monitoring for them covers the snmp-discovered temperature sensors, CPU's, power supplies, fans, and line cards--but not disk volumes. Once you start monitoring volumes, the count begins over at zero until you've monitored 100 of them--the size of your particular license. The same can be said for a stack of switches, or for a server's resources--each one is a node, each node can contain many elements that are interfaces, volumes or nodes, and the count of elements you can monitor is what the license is based on.
And you can prove that all of these resources are elements (not contained under one "node" for licensing purposes) by simply watching your poller's statistics as you add or remove interfaces, nodes, or volumes:
Don't forget to make this information available to the right people. If you are the only one with access to the info, everyone's going to keep calling you for it and you'll still be in a reactive environment that no one wants. Make the info easily available to your boss, to your Help Desk, to your Server Admins, etc. Let them see for themselves that it IS or ISN'T the network. And you'll be on your way to a predictive environment, and then to a proactive one, and finally to the place where you are able to confidently offer SLA's to your customers. Without sacrificing your home life.
When you discover you really need insight into more than 100 elements (when it comes to monitoring interfaces, this is a "when", not an "if"), learn ways to show Finance and Management that Solarwinds isn't a cost center or liability, but that it's an asset because it will help keep your business running well. Show how the right sized licenses and Solarwinds modules will reduce business operating costs by increasing up time through reducing troubleshooting and reaction time. Show how these tools enable your teams to discover a problem and troubleshoot it MUCH more quickly. We call this "MTTI": Mean Time To Innocence. NPM really helped me reduce the time it takes to KNOW that "It's not the network" and to send the ticket on to the right team for analysis and troubleshooting.
I recently switched over from four pollers with "Unlimited" SLX licenses (for 12,000 elements each) to the NAM licenses. NAM got me four new Solarwinds modules (IPAM, UDT, VNQM, and HA) in addition to the NPM/NCM/NTA I already owned, and reduced my annual support contract cost. At the same time it let me increase the base of customers that rely on Solarwinds via the new modules. It was a win-win from my point of view. Through NAM I can monitor up to 100,000 interfaces, 100,000 volumes, and 100,00 nodes. With 100 hospitals and clinics in my network, with close to 300 network rooms, monitoring every switch port and node is important. That 100,000 element top end for Interfaces is not wasted money
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