Monitoring Network Devices
Gain critical visibility into device performance and health
Monitor hardware health with robust network device monitoring software
SolarWinds® Network Performance Monitor (NPM) is built to provide hardware health overviews for your monitored devices—which is essential for managing the life cycles of servers, switches, routers, and other critical infrastructure. Using network device monitoring software, you can quickly view the current node count, filter by device status (classified as Up, Warning, Critical, and Undefined), and drill down to find unavailable or offline nodes. NPM also allows you to compare current performance to historical data, helping you proactively monitor devices for issues.
Drill down to view specific nodes with ease
When a device triggers an alert message, you need to be ready to step in at a moment’s notice. The simple and intuitive dashboard in NPM allows you to navigate from monitoring your entire infrastructure to drilling down into the selected node in critical status to view device details. Quickly view device information, including current node status, device information, average response time, packet loss, and other critical metrics in just a few clicks.
Get real-time performance details and historical data
Some performance issues can be immediately detected while others take time to fully emerge. NPM provides granular, minute-by-minute visibility into real-time performance problems and can allow you to analyze performance and hardware health data using historical benchmarks. Plus, the smart alerts system can be configured to send notifications in response to device errors, faults, shutdowns, and other events, allowing you to respond as soon as an issue is detected.
Correlate network performance and device monitoring data
NPM can help you track historical network data and correlate performance with hardware statuses. By isolating hardware issues, you can more quickly find a temporary workaround or work to replace the network device to reinstate normal network service availability. You can also use the included deep packet inspection features in NPM to track network performance. For an even more contextual overview of performance, you can also use the PerfStack™ dashboard to cross-correlate metrics across your environment.
Quickly discover network devices to start monitoring right away
Before you can start monitoring, you need to discover network devices. NPM includes an SNMP-based device scanner that regularly runs network discoveries and creates a comprehensive inventory. This information allows you to create a network topology map that can automatically update when new devices are added to your network. You can also use the dynamic topology map to visually scan for problem devices and quickly drill down for further information.
Get More on Device Monitors
Do you find yourself asking…
Network device monitoring software can use different protocols and techniques to determine network availability, functionality, and performance. Some of the most used network device monitoring protocols and techniques include SNMP and syslog.
SNMP, or Simple Network Management Protocol, is perhaps the most common network management protocol. SNMP allows administrators to collect performance data from multiple network devices simultaneously, before storing and analyzing the data in a centralized location. Monitoring software installed on each host device collects performance metrics and relays them back to the central manager, which organizes the information into database tables where it can be monitored for signs of errors and latent performance issues.
Syslog, on the other hand, is an automatic messaging system that allows admins to receive notifications from network devices in response to specified events and contingencies. Once configured, the networked device can generate syslog data about errors, unexpected shutdowns, misconfigurations, and other events, which in turn provides admins with information for security and system management purposes.
After the network monitoring software has gathered information from one of these sources, it typically compares the performance metrics of the networked devices against predetermined thresholds and can send notifications if the tool detects issues like high error rates, overly long response times, or slow network throughput.
Network device monitoring software can use different protocols and techniques to determine network availability, functionality, and performance. Some of the most used network device monitoring protocols and techniques include SNMP and syslog.
SNMP, or Simple Network Management Protocol, is perhaps the most common network management protocol. SNMP allows administrators to collect performance data from multiple network devices simultaneously, before storing and analyzing the data in a centralized location. Monitoring software installed on each host device collects performance metrics and relays them back to the central manager, which organizes the information into database tables where it can be monitored for signs of errors and latent performance issues.
Syslog, on the other hand, is an automatic messaging system that allows admins to receive notifications from network devices in response to specified events and contingencies. Once configured, the networked device can generate syslog data about errors, unexpected shutdowns, misconfigurations, and other events, which in turn provides admins with information for security and system management purposes.
After the network monitoring software has gathered information from one of these sources, it typically compares the performance metrics of the networked devices against predetermined thresholds and can send notifications if the tool detects issues like high error rates, overly long response times, or slow network throughput.
Device monitoring can provide deeper visibility into network performance
Network Performance Monitor
- Monitor multi-vendor fault, performance, and network availability
- Generate a visual representation of the health and performance of critical network gear
- Quickly identify network devices in critical status
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