UPDATED - SNEAK PEEK AT NPM 12

It took longer than usual to build this release but I can honestly say this is our biggest release in years.  NPM 12 is almost ready.

NetPath NetPath started as something we were fiddling with in the lab.  We came up with some really cool tech tidbits like: Discovering the entire, complex path that connects users to services far, far away on the Internet.  Often dozens and sometimes hundreds of routers, links, and servers. Quantifying the performance of every node and every link. Correlating hop by hop performance on a node or link that is used for a portion of the traffic to the end-to-end performance experienced by users. Determining what portion of latency is healthy and what portion is unhealthy.  That way, we can correctly mark a link between two routers in the same building as unhealthy when it takes 7ms and mark a transcontinental link that takes 30ms as healthy. Reliably mimicking application traffic so we are allowed through firewalls and treated with QOS just like application traffic is.

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At the end of the day, tools should make problems easier to understand and solve.  As Network Engineers, we know there will never be a troubleshooting easy button, but our tools should always be aspiring to achieve that goal.Today, NetPath is our very best first attempt to reach toward that goal.  Today, NetPath looks like this:

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As NetPath strives to make network problems faster and easier to solve, we're super excited to see how it impacts your view of the network and how you solve network problems.

Network Insight for F5 BIG IP

Network Insight for F5 BIG IP provides deep, relationship aware monitoring of your F5 LTMs and GTMs (BIG-IP DNS). We get new metrics like concurrent connections by pool member and health monitor status. Most importantly, we are able to relate a single component to all of the dependent components. Or enumerate all of the components that must be working for a single service to work. www.solarwinds.com is pretty important to us. We want to know fast if there is a problem, and what it is!

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UI Refresh

The UI for NPM and all other Orion based products has been refreshed. This includes two key changes.

First, we've rebuilt the top menu bar to minimize the space it uses, make navigation easier, and surface important features that are shared across several products, for example alerts and reports.

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Second, we've reskinned the rest of the pages. This means colors and styles have been changed, but the function of the page is the same. Your cheese hasn't moved, it's just a different color! (hopefully that's good)

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The goal here is a clean UI that makes it easy to focus on things that really need your attention. This overhaul also provides a path to our truly next generation UI, the first of which can be seen in NetPath.

Improved Cisco Switch Stack Monitoring

Cisco switch stacks have a layer of technology beyond a simple fixed switch that allows the stack to act as a single logical entity. This release makes it easy to understand, monitor, alert, and troubleshoot on that layer of technology. NPM can:

• List the member switches, and alert you upon membership changes.
• Identify the master and backup master switches.
• Discover CPU, RAM, and hardware health for each individual member.
• Visualize the stack ring and identify partial failures.

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And More!

ServiceNow integration, stackable poller scalability improvements, installation optimization, install pre-flight checks, built in upgrade path advisor, AD integration for discovery, auto-import from discoveries, and so much more. We can't wait to show you the rest! In the mean time, what looks most interesting to you?

And be sure to check out the video at the NPM 12 microsite!