Solar Winds Products and Their Benefits
Since its inception in 1998 by two brothers, Dave and Don Yonce, Solar Winds have grown from strength to strength. This is largely due to their great products and support, primarily provided at www.thwack.com
The company has expanded since its conception to provide faster and user-friendly network management tools, and now offers products covering Fault and Performance Monitoring, Configuration and Compliance, as well as Storage and Virtualization Management. The company also offers an extensive range of free tools relating to its core commercial products.
Let us look at just a few of their products.
IPMonitor
This is an entry level product which provides far more than entry level performance. It provides up and down monitoring of all your network devices, servers and applications at an extremely affordable price. It is quick, user-friendly and economical to deploy, as it installs in a few minutes and comes with an integrated database and Web server.
Orion Network Configuration Manager
Monitoring a network is an issue of its own, but when things go wrong, finding and fixing the fault can be a greater issue – not to mention time consuming!
As the Orion Network Configuration Manager notifies you in real time of any changes made, you are able to monitor all the changes that are likely to cause issues. The system also performs nightly configuration backups. As this product allows bulk configuration changes, you also save time while making configuration. As an added bonus, the Orion Network Configuration manager also does inventory management and compliance reporting for you.
The Orion Network Configuration Manager runs perfectly on it’s own, but it is better to install it together with the Orion Network Performance Monitor, as the two integrate seamlessly.
Orion Netflow Traffic Analyzer (NTA)
Is your network slowing down? Is a specific user and/or application hogging your bandwidth? Use this fantastic, easy to understand, NTA to find the culprit and shut it down. This software has an advanced application mapping feature. It analyzed and correlate traffic arriving from designated ports, source and destination IPs and even network protocols into easily recognizable application names. This makes it so much easier to identify the source of the problem.
IP Address Tracker
This is a free downloadable tool that can integrate with the Orion IP Address Manager. This allows you to track unlimited IP Addresses and offers a unified view of all addresses across your network. You can even see when last a particular IP address was used. Another benefit is the ability to pre-populate key statistics such as DNS and response time. All in all, this is a very useful tool for any Network Manager.
Engineers Toolset
Every day new network issues seem to appear from nowhere, and with a highly complex network, comprising of thousands of devices, it may seem like there is just never enough time to troubleshoot.
The Engineers Toolset is a collection of monitoring, discovery, diagnostic and Cisco tools. All of these tools can be accessed through the innovative Workspace Studio, which allows you to organize your tools and then recall that workspace at the click of a mouse. You set up your workspace once, rather than setting up your tools every time you need them.
- There are tools that monitor and alert, including Real-Time Interface Monitor, SNMP Real-Time Graph, and Advanced CPU Load.
- Diagnostic tools such as Ping Sweep, DNS Analyzer and Trace route are also in the set.
- Discovery tools include advanced subnet calculator, Switch Port Mapper and Port Scanner.
- There are also Cisco tools such as Real-Time NetFlow Analyzer and Config downloader.
With so many great tools available in one collection, and integrated in a way which makes them easy to use while saving you time, this is a must have toolbox for any network engineer.
After looking at the above mentioned tools, the value of Solar Winds products becomes clearer to the Network Manager. Also there is Thwack community, comprising of thousands of users, all willing to advise and help one another. All these features contribute to the popularity of Solar Wind Products.
