A long time ago in a galaxy far far away….well you know the rest of that story, but SolarWinds, another name from the cosmos, has some interesting history behind it and I thought today, with our Q3 network management news release update I would take a look back and a look at what’s next. For those of you who are new to SolarWinds first a few stats about our networking business that you may not know:
Over 75,000 customers around the globe use SolarWinds network management products
Millions of downloads of our community based free-tools
All of our tools that have evolved based on what you, our customers, have asked for
Our first set of tools were bundled together in what is today known as Engineer’s Toolset, it’s a collection of over 50 of the tools every network engineer and aspiring IT pro needs. It’s holds a special place for many of us here because it represents the start of the journey to deliver an unexpected level of simplicity for network engineers everywhere. It was also one of the drivers for creating the original SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor (NPM) product – our flagship network monitoring product. Over the years we’ve heard a lot of great stories about how NPM has helped make your lives easier and we’re always excited to hear more so if you have a great story please let me know (sanjay.castelino@solarwinds.com).
But most folks don’t know that in addition to Engineer’s Toolset and NPM we actually have a whole bunch of other useful tools. I can’t cover all of them here, but the key ones are listed on our website here. In addition, there are some products you may use every day that you may not realize came from SolarWinds – Kiwi Syslog and DNSstuff.com are 2 of the best known.
This quarter we’re continuing the evolution of our network management tools with 4 new product releases that I wanted to talk about.
First, our new VoIP and Network Quality Manager product is going to be shipping soon. The product combines both IPSLA operation data that provides visibility into WAN performance with call detail record metrics from Cisco Call Manager to give you a quick way to troubleshoot VoIP and WAN performance. This is something many of you have been asking for and we’re excited to be shipping the product.
For those of you doing something with BYOD, or just rocking back and forth wishing it would go away, we’re shipping an updated version of our User Device Tracker product (UDT) that adds support for controller based wireless access points. Now you’ll be able to pinpoint exactly where wired and wireless devices are on your network and who’s logged into them both in real-time and historically.
Third in line is a new version of NetFlow Traffic Analyzer (NTA) that will deliver some exciting new charting tools, making it much easier to drill into your traffic data. In addition for those of you looking to monitor traffic in your virtualized data centers, NTA adds support for flows from VMware vSwitches.
And last but not least is a new version of Network Configuration Manager (NCM). Network configuration management is often one of those things that you think you can live without, but in reality a large % of network problems are still caused by unintended configuration changes and if you’re an NPM customer NCM data can be automatically put into alerts giving you a quick view of config issues. This new release adds greater scalability to NCM through the use of our scalability engines as well as support for new vendors in the Japanese market (Alaxala and Apresia).
So, it’s a busy few months ahead of us, we hope you enjoy what’s coming, and before I sign off I’ll add my thanks to all of our customers and community members for being loyal supporters and vocal critics – we wouldn’t have the leadership position we do without your support, so thank you and as always questions and comments are welcome.