Monitoring Performance: Solarwinds Tips And Tricks

SolarWinds is a powerful and affordable network monitoring system that helps businesses achieve comprehensive monitoring. Its network device scanner automatically detects devices on a network, making it easier to monitor their performance. SolarWinds' network performance monitor helps businesses optimise performance, increase resiliency, and reduce downtime. The system is designed to help organisations of any scale optimise performance, ensure availability, and accelerate remediation across hybrid IT environments. SolarWinds also offers database performance monitoring, which provides a visual view of overall database health and recommendations for optimisation. Its Web Performance Monitor (WPM) helps monitor web-based applications and identify slow webpage elements that affect performance.

Monitor network performance with custom dashboards

SolarWinds offers a 30-day free trial of its Network Performance Monitor (NPM), a key feature of its Observability Self-Hosted software. This software is designed to help organisations of all scales optimise performance, ensure availability, and accelerate remediation across hybrid IT environments.

One of the features of SolarWinds is the ability to create custom dashboards to monitor network performance. Dashboards are the visual interfaces that present the status overview of all the critical elements monitored by the network management system (NMS). Effective dashboards are vital in an NMS, allowing network admins to address issues immediately and display real-time data in easily understandable formats.

Custom dashboards can be tailored to individual users or user groups, with different login accounts and access rights, to simplify management efforts. The extent of data presented can be varied using a flexible filtering mechanism, making reports more meaningful for different user groups.

To set up custom dashboards, users can refer to the SolarWinds Resource Centre, which provides a whitepaper on "How to create the Ultimate Network Management Dashboard".

Monitor router traffic

To monitor router traffic and performance with SolarWinds, you can use a variety of tools and methods to gain visibility into your network and ensure optimal performance. Here are some steps and features to consider:

• NetFlow Traffic Analysis: SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer is a powerful tool for monitoring router traffic. It provides a detailed view of network traffic patterns, allowing you to analyze traffic data and identify bandwidth usage by application, protocol, or IP address. With this tool, you can set custom traffic thresholds and receive alerts when utilization exceeds predefined limits, helping you quickly identify and troubleshoot issues.
• Deep Packet Inspection: SolarWinds Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) enables you to inspect the content of network packets. This feature provides visibility into the specific applications and protocols generating traffic on your network. By understanding the type and volume of traffic passing through your routers, you can optimize performance, prioritize critical applications, and identify any abnormal or malicious activity.
• Router Performance Monitoring: SolarWinds offers comprehensive router performance monitoring capabilities. This includes tracking key metrics such as CPU utilization, memory usage, interface statistics, and packet loss. Real-time monitoring helps you proactively identify bottlenecks, potential points of failure, or performance degradation. Set performance thresholds and receive alerts to ensure the stability of your network infrastructure.
• Bandwidth Utilization Monitoring: Effective monitoring of bandwidth utilization is crucial for maintaining optimal router performance. SolarWinds provides tools to analyze bandwidth usage trends, identify peak usage times, and detect bandwidth-intensive applications or users. This information aids in capacity planning and traffic shaping, ensuring a smooth user experience, especially in limited or fluctuating bandwidth environments.
• Customizable Dashboards and Reports: SolarWinds offers customizable dashboards and reports for a centralized view of router performance and traffic data. Tailor these dashboards to display real-time metrics, graphs, and alerts specific to your monitoring needs. Additionally, generate detailed reports to track historical trends, identify performance bottlenecks, and make data-driven decisions for network optimization.
• Alerting and Notification: SolarWinds provides advanced alerting capabilities to notify you of critical issues or anomalies in router performance or traffic patterns. Customize alerts based on specific thresholds, events, or anomalies to ensure proactive notification. Alerts can be sent through email, SMS, or integrated messaging platforms, enabling timely response and remediation.

By leveraging these features and tools within SolarWinds, you can effectively monitor router traffic, optimize performance, and maintain the health and stability of your network infrastructure.

Monitor wireless devices

SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor (NPM) is a powerful and affordable network monitoring software that helps IT technicians to detect, diagnose, and resolve network performance problems and outages quickly and efficiently. It provides in-depth insight into the network, identifying the root source of a network issue to allow for faster resolution times.

NPM can monitor any 802.11 IEEE-compliant autonomous access point (AP) or wireless controller, and provide details about access points (APs), wireless clients, wireless controllers, thin APs, and rogue APs. It automatically recognizes wireless APs and controllers as wireless devices when they are added to the SolarWinds Platform database.

IT admins can consolidate network device data into one central, easy-to-access dashboard. The dashboard’s filter feature makes it easy to find the details you need. You can also view performance, traffic, and configuration details of devices and apps—whether on-premises, in the cloud, or across hybrid environments—via the Wi-Fi network monitor.

SolarWinds NPM also allows you to visualize wireless coverage, making it easy to identify dead zones, make adjustments, and improve coverage. NPM Wi-Fi monitoring tools use the information from wireless access points, connected clients, and their signal strengths per access point to create a heat map. These in-depth heat maps automatically update every five minutes to reflect changing connectivity, helping you gain accurate coverage visibility.

SolarWinds User Device Tracker (UDT) is another tool that can be used to monitor wireless devices. It allows you to find wired and wireless endpoint devices on your network by IP address, MAC address, or device vendor. If the device authenticates with Microsoft Active Directory, you can also search by username and hostname. UDT reports which wireless access point, network switch, and switch port the endpoint device is connected to. It also monitors wireless access points and network switches and switch ports, helping you to identify faults and performance problems, manage utilization, and plan for additional capacity.

Monitor web-based applications

SolarWinds provides a range of tools to help monitor web-based applications. The SolarWinds Web Performance Monitor (WPM) is an industry-leading tool that can help you automatically monitor your web-based applications. It provides complete performance monitoring, allowing you to monitor web and SaaS application performance.

WPM allows you to experience your app like a user, recording and running critical transactions as frequently as every five minutes. It provides detailed load time metrics, so you can identify and resolve slow webpage elements that affect overall performance. The software can help diagnose latency issues, with enhanced text-matching capabilities for synthetic end-user monitoring.

WPM also offers regular expression text matching, allowing you to match any regular expression to an entire line or a block of lines. This helps with synthetic end-user monitoring, as you can test the end-user experience based on the screen resolution of the device used to access your web application.

The intuitive transaction recorder captures steps in a web transaction without scripting, allowing you to record complex, multi-step transactions with ease. With informative performance reporting, you can generate custom website performance reports, including page load speeds, transaction health, and website uptime.

Additionally, SolarWinds Observability Self-Hosted provides server and application monitoring, allowing you to monitor and optimize server and application performance. This includes the flexibility to monitor custom applications and provides full visibility into your IT environment with end-to-end server application monitoring.

Monitor database health

SolarWinds offers a few different tools for monitoring database health.

Database Observability

Database Observability is a SaaS application designed to continuously monitor database performance and provide insights into health and detailed performance metrics. It helps simplify database health checks with flexible tools and expert guidance, including instant recommendations on server configuration changes and queries with potentially bad behaviour. It also includes a powerful, customisable alerting system to notify stakeholders of any abnormalities before they affect database availability or performance.

Database Performance Analyzer (DPA)

DPA is a comprehensive database monitoring tool that supports multiple database types, including SQL Server, Oracle, MySQL, MariaDB, Aurora, IBM Db2, and ASE. It measures each SQL database query and response time to identify the most impactful queries and inefficient workloads, allowing users to focus their query tuning efforts. It also integrates with the Orion® Platform to provide a more complete optimisation solution.

Database Performance Monitor (DPM)

DPM is a SaaS platform with a web-based user interface that monitors databases in the cloud, locally, or in a hybrid environment. It provides a visual view of overall database health and provides recommendations for optimisation. It also includes an adaptive fault detection feature to help find small interruptions to server or service availability before they become serious outages.

Frequently asked questions