SolarWinds, a successful network management tools
provider that few have heard of, will stop flying
under the radar May 21 at Interop when it launches
the latest release of its Engineer's Toolset and
announces the acquisition of Neon Software.
The
9-year-old company, whose flagship network management
software has an installed base of about 40,000 copies
despite its not having done any marketing, upgraded
its set of network management utilities with new
NetFlow analysis and support for SNMP V3 and Microsoft's
Windows Vista.
"We
build products by engineers, for engineers, and
sell over the Web at low price points. We have a
strong brand name amongst network engineers without
the fanfare because of word of mouth," said
Kenny Van Zant, chief product strategist for SolarWinds
Network Management Solutions, in Austin, Texas.
"I
ran into them about five years ago. At the time
I needed a little extra help to maintain the different
network nodes I had. Their tool set had a unique
mix of Cisco-specific and generic tools, and it
fit the bill," said longtime user Scott Andrews,
senior network engineer at Network Engineering and
Support Group in Lakewood, Wash.
The
Engineer's Toolset gathers availability and performance
data about the network using several mechanisms,
including ICMP, SNMP, DNS (Domain Name System) and
Syslog. The diagnostic data it collects is automatically
stored in a database for additional analysis.
Van
Zant described it as a "Swiss Army Knife for
the network engineer. It has 48 different utilities
that do network discovery, diagnostics, monitoring,
configuration management—everything you want
to do in real time as a network manager," he
said.
The
tool set is typically used with other monitoring
systems such as Hewlett-Packard's OpenView Network
Node Manager. "Once you spot a problem you
use the toolset to debug it in real time,"
Van Zant said.
The
new NetFlow support allows the Engineer's Toolset
to gather captured traffic flow statistics, including
bandwidth usage and consumption by protocol, application
and individual user.
"Maybe
a router interface is congested, so you can jump
in and with a couple of clicks see what's going
on in that interface. There's no need for an expensive
server to do that data collection," Van Zant
said.
To read more about Neon Software's LANsurveyor,
click
here.
"I
do lot of SNMP monitoring, but it misses the granularity
you get with NetFlow information," said Andrews,
who described SolarWinds' implementation as "pretty
good." He is beta testing the new release.
Andrews,
who said he uses the Toolset at least every other
day if not more often, was pleased to see the SNMP
V3 support and described the latest version as "a
lot more polished now."
Engineer's
Toolset 9.0 is available now for $995 plus maintenance.
SolarWinds on May 21 at Interop will also announce
that it has acquired privately held Neon Software,
which is best known for its LANsurveyor network
asset discovery, mapping and topology visualization
offering.
"It's
about documenting what the network looks like for
an accurate topology map of the network. It can
say what switch port every device is connected to,"
Van Zant said.
LANsurveyor
10.0, a new version of the tool, is available from
SolarWinds now. It was enhanced to provide real-time
updates with continuous scan, support for new discovery
mechanisms including SNMP V 2 and V 3 as well as
Active Directory, automated Visio diagram generation
and spanning tree support. It is priced at $1,995.