New SolarWinds Orion Release – An Overview by our Resident SolarWinds Expert

Our resident SolarWinds Expert Brian Steele shares his opinions on the latest updates from SolarWinds and what they mean to the current users.

Brian is an extremely experienced consultant specialising in SolarWinds and has led the delivery of many of our largest and most complex SolarWinds deployments, along with our Team of SolarWinds Certified Engineers.

The team specialises in helping SolarWinds users to get the most out of their software investment, this includes system optimisation, custom dashboards, custom reports, complex alerting structures and integration with 3rd party systems for an integrated approach to IT Operations.

To book a free 1 hour SolarWinds consultation with Brian, click here

Introduction

This is a significant release with some interesting and practical new features to help you save time and resources. If you are running your SolarWinds ORION system on Windows/SQL 2008 I strongly recommend upgrading to Windows 2012/2016 and SQL 2014/2016 to future proof your investment. If you still think you don’t want to upgrade then bear in mind that I have read all 71 of the following fix notices (and this is just for ORION Platform Services and NPM) and have found several fixed issues relating to polling lockups, inconsistent data, resource hogging and performance.

Details

On the 13th September 2017 SolarWinds released significant updates across a raft of modules. For the last three weeks I have been working with these new modules performing installs, upgrades and feature investigations… here are my findings:

New Module Releases:

• ORION Platform Services – 2017.3
• NPM (Network Performance Monitor) - v12.2
• NTA (NetFlow Traffic Analyser) – v4.2.3
• NCM (Network Configuration Manager) – v7.7
• SAM (Server & Application Monitor) – v6.4 HF1
• WPM (Web Performance Monitor) – v2.2.1
• VM (Virtualisation Manager) – v8.0
• SRM (Storage Recourse Monitor) – v6.5
• IPAM (IP Address Manager) – v4.5.2
• VNQM (VoIP & Network Quality Manager) – v4.4.1

So what are the BIG changes?

New Install Process - The first big change is the new installation process, which I have been eagerly anticipating for the last 12+ months. Gone is the old cumbersome installation process, which required you to download then install modules one by one and then manually apply the required patches. With the new installation process, you select the modules you need from a list and everything else (download, install & patch) is automated for you. I was able to install all ten modules in 90 minutes compared to 1-2 days.

KedronUK and ExtraHop Join Forces to Deliver Deeper IT Performance Insights for UK Enterprises

NPM and APM Experts Turn to Wire Data Analytics to Solve Complex Performance Issues and Aid Troubleshooting

LONDON, UK - August 1, 2016 – ExtraHop, the global leader in real-time wire data analytics for IT intelligence and business operations, today announced a partnership with KedronUK, a leading network and application performance management consultancy. KedronUK helps organisations increase visibility and control across network and application infrastructure by combining leading technology, knowledge and services. KedronUK customers include Vodafone, William Hill, Hertfordshire County Council, Barratt Developments and Cambridgeshire Fire and Rescue.

A quick guide to Server Monitoring Software

Any modern business relies heavily on having a dependable IT network that functions efficiently all of the time. When a network goes down it means a loss in business activity – most modern businesses rely on an internet connection all day and when employees cannot connect they cannot do their work.

Why Do Network and Application Monitoring Projects Fail?

It would be fair to say that a big challenge that KedronUK face when working with new Clients, is that many have been “burnt” in the past when trying to successfully deploy a Network or Application Performance Monitoring solution.

The projects are usually prompted and given budget to begin with, because the organisation has suffered a high profile outage or issue. Therefore, the project itself is usually by nature high profile, and this means that the pressure is on! 

Expert Advice: Tackling IT Service Performance Issues

We managed to track down the very busy Phil Swainson, Head of Technical Services at KedronUK, to put some questions to him about his experiences when helping Clients to establish root cause for service performance issues.

We hope you find the information useful, read more about Phil’s background after the questions.

Q1. You often deal with clients who have disgruntled end users and customers who complain of "slow network performance” and they ask KedronUK for their advice on dealing with that challenge. The phrase “It’s Not the Network” is a bit of cliché these days (it's even available on T-Shirts and Mugs) but in your experience how often is “it" actually the network?

How to Integrate your IT Service Desk and Fault Management Systems

Although having a two-way integration between your Ticketing System and the Fault Management platform is common within large Service Providers, it’s less frequent within other sectors.

That’s probably because within Service Providers it’s typical to have whole teams to review the tools that are used to facilitate IT Service Delivery. Anywhere else, it’s usually just another job on a long list!

Importance of Network Monitoring Software for your business

It is vital for any business to ensure that their IT network is capable of meeting their future needs. To enable this, a business must have a thorough understanding of its current network and how it will respond to new forms of technology.

This is why a network monitoring tool is necessary to provide data and information to on inform about both, providing you with updated information on the network and changes that need to be made to assist the IT infrastructure.

Niksun

Here at Kedron we are dedicated to providing our customers with effective network performance tools; we sell from many of the biggest brands in the industry, including NIKSUN. 

The NIKSUN NetDetector Alpine is one of the most popular appliances for network performance monitoring; it competently monitors networks for “performance, security and policy compliance” which is why it is used by businesses across all industries. 

Ixia

Here at Kedron we are specialists in combining the most modern technology and expert knowledge so that we can provide our customers with increased visibility and control across their network.
 

Kedron is a partner of the Ixia company in the UK and Ireland, which means that we can offer full installation and configuration of Ixia services.

Who are Ixia?
 

Ixia make test systems for both wireless and wired services; they test IP networks for reliability and security.

Understanding Network Latency

A common SLA requirement in network provisioning is ‘Network Delay’, with many Service Providers being required to give service credits against ‘poor’ performance of this metric.

This leads to the question of “How do you measure Network Delay?”. As the old adage states; ‘If you can’t measure it, then you can’t manage it’.

Challenges to the network optimisation

Information technology is expanding at an exponential rate with more and more applications consuming larger amounts of network bandwidth. This can lead to wider ranging challenges being faced and increased stress on the network architecture of an organisation, due to the larger volumes of data being produced by such applications.