SolarWinds adds SDN monitoring to network management tools

SolarWinds updated its network management portfolio, as well as its Orion Platform. The update is designed to address the increasing adoption of software-defined networking (SDN) technology -- in particular, Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure, or ACI. SolarWinds' Network Performance Monitor offers SDN monitoring for logical components of customers' infrastructures, including Application Policy Infrastructure Controllers, tenants, application profiles, endpoint groups and physical entities.

The service's anomaly detection capabilities were updated, and they offer expanded alerts for unexpected behavior in the infrastructure, configuration baselines to help prevent configuration drift and updated PerfStack dashboards for cross-stack troubleshooting. With added support for Infoblox, administrators have extended visibility into network operations, with the ability to monitor Infoblox Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol and domain name system services in a centralized dashboard.

The SDN monitoring and network management updates include the following:

• Network Performance Monitor 12.4 offers support for Cisco ACI to help users monitor their Cisco SDN deployment.
• Network Configuration Manager 7.9 offers the ability to define and apply multi-device baselines or config snippets to any network node. The update is designed to enhance the ability to identify configuration drift and adhere to corporate configuration standards.
• NetFlow Traffic Analyzer 4.5 expands alerting to notify users if application traffic suddenly increases or decreases and indicate if a device stops sending flow data.

The Orion Platform offers management capabilities across on-premises, hosted and public cloud environments. The platform's update includes Security Assertion Markup Language authentication support, enabling single sign-on to the Orion Web Console.