SolarWinds' NPM 11.0: Here's What MSPs Need to Know

SolarWinds (SWI) yesterday announced it has added enterprise-class deep packet inspection (DPI) and analysis technology to its IT management software. SolarWinds is the acquirer and parent company of remote monitoring and management platform provider N-able.

The company’s new release, Network Performance Monitor (NPM) version 11.0, is designed to help network engineers troubleshoot application and performance issues.

“[NPM] is the product that helped define the foundation of our network management portfolio nearly 15 years ago,” said Chris LaPoint, SolarWinds’ vice president of product management. “With the addition of DPI and analysis technology, SolarWinds NPM provides a comprehensive view of network fault, performance, availability, traffic and now latency in the context of application performance.”

Built-in DPI and analysis can help network engineers “quickly and accurately identify network and application reliability and performance issues,” according to SolarWinds.

“With DPI, network engineers or systems administrators can quickly isolate the underlying cause of application performance, thus reducing mean time to resolution and network downtime. It helps answer the all-important question: Is it the network or the application?” Brad Hale, SolarWinds’ product marketing principal for network management, told MSPmentor.

NPM 11.0 features:

NPM pricing starts at $2,675 and includes:

A free 30-day NPM 11.0 trial can be downloaded here.

Where is the RMM software market going?

The new SolarWinds release could be a sign of things to come in the remote monitoring and management (RMM) software market.

SolarWinds’ mission is to provide “affordable and powerful IT management software to customers worldwide.”

SolarWinds’ NPM 11.0 launch comes only days after RMM provider GFI Max announced a milestone, more than 10,000 managed service providers (MSPs) are using its RemoteManagement platform.

RMM software provider LabTech Software also recently was named one of Tampa Bay’s fastest-growing companies after it recorded consecutive annual revenue growth from 2011 to 2013.

SolarWinds, meanwhile, boasts more than 150,000 customers, and the new NPM release highlights its mission to support its customers’ evolving IT needs.

“With SolarWinds NPM 11.0, we continue to respond to the evolving needs of our community of IT pros and their requests to help simplify troubleshooting,” LaPoint said in a prepared statement. “Now with the new DPI technology and just a few clicks, network engineers have the power to go above and beyond network fault and availability monitoring to quickly identify, classify and analyze whether it’s the network or the application to determine the root cause of poor user experience.”

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