As a long-time user of, I was quite excited to review the latest 12.0 release of the NPM product. The new features add immense value to the already-robust management suite, validating its recent champion ranking in our.New features and improvements:– Brand new UI– NetPath Services– Network Insight for F5® BIG-IP®– Cisco Switch Stack monitoring– ServiceNow® Integration– Updated Discovery– Performance Improvements– MoreEVERY NODE. EVERY NETWORK.This is the statement SolarWinds is making with its latest release of NPM. The simple and powerful interface adds immediate value upon installation – it’s intuitive, no-training-required interface, extends UX seamlessly across the SolarWinds product portfolio.Below I’ll provide my review of what I consider to be the top 3 features and enhancements with SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor (NPM) 12.0. Sleek, modernized User InterfaceThis has been a long time coming; SolarWinds Orion got a makeover, and she’s! The entire user interface has been overhauled, with new navigation schemes and streamlined access to the most important components. This is a minimalist approach to a maximalist solution, eliminating noise to narrow your focus on what’s most important.Users familiar with the previous versions of NPM are accustomed to the tabular menu, where a separate menu bar was associated with each tab.
Each user can have customized menu bars, and administrators can control which tabs each user will see. For many reasons, this tabular menu has proven to be cumbersome and non-intuitive, leading SolarWinds to redesign for user friendliness.Old UIWith Orion NPM 12.0, we see a new UI with navigation consuming much less real estate. The top navigation bar is simple and elegant, comprised of the most important top-level menu items: My Dashboards, Alerts & Activity, Reports, and Settings. This is reflective of the direction SolarWinds is moving to, truly focusing on user experience.New UIMy DashboardThe new navigation scheme takes advantage of dashboards, condensing the menu-bar sprawl seen in previous versions into a single, bird’s eye view drop-down.As you can see, this view can get out-of-hand once you start adding additional modules.
This is the reason for the “Collapse” button at the bottom of the menu. To make better use of the My Dashboards space, you can collapse to an optimized view. Personally, this is likely the view that I’ll use by default.Alerts & ActivityYou now have a completely customizable, quick top-menu access to actionable events and alerts. By default you’ll see the following under this menu, but you can effortlessly add more items as needed.SettingsAgain, completely customizable, you now have immediate access to all settings, or to specific areas of the settings that you frequent the most.
No more clicking through a series of menus for some of these common tasks like adding nodes.People are typically nervous about interface changes – there is no need to fret, as SolarWinds has done an excellent job at mapping familiar menus to the new schema. SolarWinds says users who had early access raved about the improvements, and after my “insider’s look” at the product, I personally love the new UI.Consistency:There is much more than just navigation. The entire look and feel of Orion has modernized. The backend style sheets have been updated not only for appearance, but also for productivity. Graphs, charts and icons across the entire system have been refreshed.
Consistency is important, meaning you’ll see the same theme across the entire system.Learn more with this brief video. NetPath Services“The internet is complex.”NetPath was conceived from the simple notion above. With a growing number of companies moving applications to the cloud and having them delivered as a service, end-to-end visibility is paramount in order to better understand where issues could arise. Myths around cloud, “don’t worry about it, it just works,” are foolish to say the least. When users start complaining that Salesforce is slow, how can you troubleshoot and identify what’s actually going on? Enter.One simple word: WOW!
NetPath is one of the most exciting features I’ve seen from SolarWinds. It allows you to visualize, discover and troubleshoot network paths hop-by-hop. It also provides detailed visibility, not only within your own network, but also the network outside of your organization. This makes it easier to answer those questions about application performance, no matter where the application is hosted. Are expertly overcome with NetPath.What’s happening?NetPath probes are deployed in your infrastructure. These can be on general-purpose Windows workstations, servers in Data Centers, or on your Orion pollers. These probes talk to NPM, reporting detailed statistics and metrics regarding the path between itself and the destination you configure.
For example, you can configure a NetPath to Facebook.com and the probe will dynamically map out, hop-by-hop, the detailed path to that destination. This includes your internal infrastructure, but more importantly, the infrastructure outside your organization. Nearly 80% of the public Internet is multi-path, so NPM’s NetPath discovers and displays this information in a collapsible and interactive interface, essentially mapping the Internet.Creating NetPathsBy default, NPM will ship with “www.Google.com” configured as a NetPath. You will be able to drill down into the massive network between you and Google. This is great if you’re using Google as a cloud provider for apps like Gmail or Google Docs.
Let’s say you’re using several SaaS applications, such as Salesforce or SAS – building a NetPath to these services is a breeze. Setting one up myself, with no prior experience, took less than 60 seconds.What does this get you?Once your NetPaths are setup, maps are automatically built showing detailed information within your internal network, traversed segments of the ISP network(s), and the destination network. Hone in on particular nodes within the network to gather status, statistics, and support information.Maximum levels of details are provided end-to-end. NetPath monitors the configured paths at regular intervals, keeping historical data on each individual hop.Look back on incidents and find out exactly where in the network the issue arose. Which ISP is responsible, and how do you contact them? This information is at your fingertips, parsed using public databases that ISP operators are required to update.NCM & NTA IntegrationOne of my complaints with SolarWinds in the past is lack of integration between modules.
You would expect seamless tie-in between modules you purchase, but that historically isn’t the case. We have started to see these integrations over the last couple versions of NPM, and I’m happy to see that NPM’s NetPath is utilizing the Network Configuration Manager (NCM) and NetFlow Traffic Analyzer (NTA) modules!This means we’ll be able to see network configuration changes as potential culprits within the path. Amazing!Quickly pull up a config diff to see what changed.ReportingReports are dynamically baselined. If latency goes up on a few links, but it doesn’t impact overall end-to-end RTT, nothing will be reported. Network Insight for F5® BIG-IP® load balancersAlong the same trend of deep visibility, SolarWinds adds comprehensive F5 monitoring with Network Insight.
At first breath, previous users of NPM may not think this to be anything new, for NPM could monitor F5 devices for standard health and performance in prior versions.
NPM 12.5 RequirementsUpdated: June 6, 2019Supports: NPM 12.5Important: These system requirements define the minimum requirements for all products on Orion Platform 2019.2. Products may have different requirements, such as OS or memory, and may differ per license level.For additional information on requirements and configurations, see the. You should also review your product administration guides and release notes for the exact product requirements beyond these minimums.We also recommend reviewing the. Software requirementsDo not install NPM on the same server as.The following table lists software requirements and recommendations for an NPM installation on both physical and virtual computers.Software RequirementsOperating system. Windows Server 2016.
Windows Server 2019Desktop operating systems, such as Windows 10, 64-bit Pro or Enterprise, are supported for evaluation environments only. To make a smooth transition from your evaluation to production deployment, SolarWinds recommends that you avoid installing evaluations on desktop operating systems.Support differences between Orion Agents and Orion Platform products. You cannot install Orion Platform products on domain controllers. Exception: You can install Orion Agents on domain controllers. You cannot install Orion Platform products or any scalability engines on Microsoft SharePoint, Microsoft Exchange, or BlackBerry servers. Exception: You can install Orion Agents on the same server as a Microsoft SharePoint, Microsoft Exchange or Research in Motion (RIM) Blackberry server.End-of-support notice: Products with Orion Platform 2018.4 and later are no longer compatible with Windows Server 2012 and 2012 R2.
To use the new features introduced in Orion Platform 2018.4 or later, at your earliest convenience.Operating system languages. English (UK or US). German. Japanese. Simplified ChineseIP address versionIPv4IPv6Dual stackCIDR notation is not supported for IPv6 addresses.Web serverIf you are not using Windows Authentication, make sure the Anonymous Authentication is enabled for the SolarWinds NetPerfMon website.
Anonymous Authentication is used with the default forms-based authentication.IIS is installed by the SolarWinds installer. You can install this software manually to reduce your installation time.NET Framework.NET 4.8. Run the same version of. NET on your primary server and any Additional Polling Engines or Additional Web Servers in the environment. Was introduced in NPM 12.5 Hotfix 1.ServicesIf you are using the Syslog or SNMP Traps feature of the Orion Platform, make sure the following services are running after installation is complete to collect syslog messages and traps:.
SolarWinds Syslog Service. SolarWinds Trap ServiceWeb console browserOrion Platform products support two most recent versions of the following web browsers available at the release date:. Firefox. ChromeOrion Platform products also support the following browsers:.
Microsoft Internet Explorer 11 with Active scriptingDo not enable Enterprise Mode on Internet Explorer. This setting forces Internet Explorer to emulate version 7, which is not supported. Microsoft EdgeAccount privilegesSolarWinds recommends that SolarWinds Orion administrators have local administrator privileges on the Orion server to ensure full functionality of local SolarWinds tools.SolarWinds Orion user accounts limited to the Orion Web Console do not require local administrator privileges.
Server port requirements. Ports 4369, 25672, and 5672 are opened by default on the main server for RabbitMQ messaging.
These ports can be blocked by the firewall. When running SolarWinds High Availability,.
RPC ports 1024 (TCP, bidirectional) is used by the Job Engine v2 process to communicate with Windows nodes.PortPro-tocolService/ProcessDirectionDescriptionEncryptionuser-defined, default: 22SSHSolarWinds Job Engine v2IISOutbound from the Orion server to the devicePort for accessing ASA devices through CLIDevice-based25TCPSolarWinds Alerting Service V2OutboundSMTP port for non-encrypted messagesn/a53UDPSolarWinds Job Engine v2Bi-directionalResolving DNS queriesn/a80TCPIISInboundDefault additional web server port. If you specify any port other than 80, you must include that port in the URL used to access the web console. For example, if you specify an IP address of 192.168.0.3 and port 8080, the URL used to access the web console isOpen the port to enable communication from your computers to the Orion Web Console.The port might also be used for Cisco UCS monitoring.n/a135TCPMicrosoft EPMAP (DCE/RPC Locator service)Bi-directionalRequired for devices polled via WMI.
Used to initiate communication with the remotely managed host.161UDPSolarWinds Job Engine v2SolarWinds CortexBi-directionalSend and receive SNMPinformationSNMP v1 and v2 are unencrypted. Hardware requirements are listed by deployment size, based on the.CPU recommendations for XL deployments use the PassMark Score.
To learn more, see (Copyright © 2018 PassMark® Software, obtained at on April 9, 2018). The Orion server and the SolarWinds Orion database must use separate servers.If you install on a virtual machine, you must maintain your SQL Server database on a separate, physical drive.As of Orion Platform 2019.2, you can use as your database server.As of Orion Platform 2018.2, you can use as your database server. Recommendations. Use 64-bit version of SQL Server. Use the Simple database recovery mode to ensure best performance. You can set the database recovery model to Full Recovery if your Orion Database is hosted on a SQL Cluster or if you use Always On Availability.
However, you must back up your database regularly and ensure that volume you store your transaction log has free space that is at least equal to or greater than the size of your Orion database. Due to intense I/O requirements, a RAID 1+0 drive is strongly recommended for the SolarWinds database, data, and log files with a dedicated drive for the server operating system and tempdb files. Other RAID configurations can negatively affect your SQL Server's performance. Mirrored drives for the OS and RAID 1+0 for database data files are recommended. Solid state drives (SSD) are recommended for all components.Some common files may need to be installed on the same drive as your server operating system. You may want to move or expand the Windows or SQL temporary directories.Memory8 GB minimum16 GB recommended16 GB minimum64 GB recommended64 GB minimum128 GB recommended256 GB minimum512 GB recommendedAuthenticationEither mixed-mode or Windows authentication.
If you require SQL authentication, you must enable mixed mode on your SQL server.Other softwareSolarWinds recommends you install the SQL Server Management Studio component on your Orion database server.The Orion Installer installs the following required x86 components if they are not found on your Orion database server:. SQL Server System Common Language Runtime (CLR) Types.