SolarWinds announced enhancements to its flagship Network Performance Monitor (NPM) to improve business mobility and uptime.

With new wireless heat mapping, IT Pros can maintain automatic, real-time maps of wireless network signal strength to enhance continuous wireless coverage throughout an environment and accelerate troubleshooting. With new capacity forecasting, IT Pros can also automatically keep tabs on critical network resources to help predict future needs and prevent outages.

“When it comes to network monitoring, SolarWinds has always advocated that IT Pros take the back-to-basics approach. We know visibility into the health and performance of a network is essential to any organization,” said Chris LaPoint, VP Product Management, SolarWinds. “However, as BYOD and increasingly mobile workforces evolve networks in new and complex ways, the ‘basics’ are changing, so it’s critical that IT Pros have a single, dependable solution to automate tedious – yet essential – network monitoring tasks. SolarWinds NPM ensures that the fundamentals of network monitoring are not overlooked.”

Automate wireless network mapping to enhance wireless coverage: With SolarWinds NPM’s NEW wireless network heat maps, IT Pros can automatically map their wireless networks to show signal strength according to their floor plans – whether in small doctor’s offices or a 40,000-sq. ft. campus – with a visual display of critical status and performance metrics. With these maps, IT can now:

- Troubleshoot client connectivity issues, keeping mobile end-users working with minimal disruption to their productivity

- Generate user-sourced wireless signal strength surveys for coverage in all network locations, including remote sites

- Prioritize wireless signal strength where it is most needed and proactively make adjustments such as adding wireless access points, modifying the environment, etc.

- Use client location tracking to find any wireless-connected device within the network, helping IT keep track of end-users and rogue or misplaced devices

Automate capacity planning to prevent network outages: With NEW capacity forecasting, IT Pros can automate planning for network needs (bandwidth, WAN circuits, etc.) to help prevent poor performance and sudden network outages. IT can now:

- Use historical data from SolarWinds NPM on CPU, memory, volumes, connected wireless clients, node, and interface traffic utilization to provide automated assessments of average and peak use

- Answer the question, "How many days before I run out of disk space/CPU/bandwidth, etc. and it impacts a user’s network connectivity?" and set customizable alerts to proactively secure the necessary network resources to get ahead of those situations

SolarWinds NPM provides a comprehensive view of network fault, performance, availability, traffic, and latency, empowering IT Pros to more effectively identify, prioritize and resolve network issues before they impact application performance, end-users and businesses. Other automatic network performance monitoring features include deep packet inspection (DPI) for assessment of network latency’s impact on application performance with automated application identification, and automated mapping and alerting of device dependencies for improved root-cause analysis.

The new version of SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor will be available within the first quarter 2015.