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SolarWinds Enhances Network Performance Monitor

SolarWinds announced further enhancements to SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor (NPM) that offer the robust network performance monitoring, alerting and reporting capabilities available in ‘Big Four’ enterprise software, but at an affordable, unique-to-industry price.

The latest SolarWinds NPM demonstrates a continued commitment to simplifying network management in the datacenter amidst increasingly complex network challenges.

“SolarWinds focuses on developing products that solve the everyday needs of all IT Professionals – most of whom don’t have deep pockets or time to spare installing or configuring software,” said Chris LaPoint, VP Product Management, SolarWinds. “And as technology advances and networks grow increasingly complex, SolarWinds must preserve our long-standing tradition of providing the powerful capabilities of enterprise-level software you might see in expensive ‘Big Four’ software, but without the need for professional services and at a price that nearly any organization can afford.”

In keeping with the tradition of delivering advanced functionality at a market-differentiating price, SolarWinds NPM has added new baseline threshold calculating functionality, providing the deep visibility and advanced analytics not previously available to network administrators at such a price.

Other features SolarWinds NPM was previously first to introduce to the market for a low cost include enterprise-level wireless support for LAN controllers and thin access points, monitoring for major routing protocols including OSPF and BGP, and a high-availability Failover Engine, all of which have differentiated SolarWinds NPM as a uniquely powerful, yet affordable, network monitoring solution.

New SolarWinds NPM Features:

· Dynamic baseline threshold calculation defines critical network device thresholds based on historical network performance data, enabling users to configure alerts simply and accurately. It automatically gathers baseline data for specified time intervals (weekly or daily) to determine normal operating parameters and calculates thresholds with relevant alerts – good, warning, critical, or down – which allow IT Pros to quickly assess whether a device is up and performing poorly or is about to fail.

· Custom NOC views provide the ability to easily configure and display real-time fault, performance, and availability dashboards tailored to the needs of a network operations center (NOC) of any size.

· Dynamic customizable network mapping enables IT Pros to drag and drop network devices into network maps and automatically view real-time and color-coded link utilization for fully customized and detailed insight into network health beyond up-down status. The Network Weather Map’s dynamic link utilization helps IT Pros identify when the network is approaching critical thresholds so they can prevent network errors and downtime.

· Enhancements to the universal device poller feature allow users to easily add a CPU and memory utilization chart in the SolarWinds NPM dashboard for additional uncommon devices, and includes those new device statistics in monitoring and reporting.

· Support for additional routing protocols and added support for Ruckus and Motorola wireless controllers and devices enable broader network monitoring for IT Pros.

SolarWinds continues to engage with the vast IT Pro community to understand their challenges and needs and to develop software that reflects those needs. thwack is SolarWinds’ online community of over 130,000 IT Pros who share content, ask and answer questions, and request and vote on new SolarWinds product features.

“thwack is second to none,” said Ashley Cotter, applications engineer for Timico who evaluated an early version of SolarWinds NPM’s latest features. “I voted for the new baseline threshold alerting and it’s now included in the software. I can ask SolarWinds senior developers technical questions on a peer level and I know I’m actively impacting SolarWinds product development, and that’s just not something I’ve seen anywhere else.”

The Latest

Like most digital transformation shifts, organizations often prioritize productivity and leave security and observability to keep pace. This usually translates to both the mass implementation of new technology and fragmented monitoring and observability (M&O) tooling. In the era of AI and varied cloud architecture, a disparate observability function can be dangerous. IT teams will lack a complete picture of their IT environment, making it harder to diagnose issues while slowing down mean time to resolve (MTTR). In fact, according to recent data from the SolarWinds State of Monitoring & Observability Report, 77% of IT personnel said the lack of visibility across their on-prem and cloud architecture was an issue ...

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Enterprises are under pressure to scale AI quickly. Yet despite considerable investment, adoption continues to stall. One of the most overlooked reasons is vendor sprawl ... In reality, no organization deliberately sets out to create sprawling vendor ecosystems. More often, complexity accumulates over time through well-intentioned initiatives, such as enterprise-wide digital transformation efforts, point solutions, or decentralized sourcing strategies ...

Nearly every conversation about AI eventually circles back to compute. GPUs dominate the headlines while cloud platforms compete for workloads and model benchmarks drive investment decisions. But underneath that noise, a quieter infrastructure challenge is taking shape. The real bottleneck in enterprise AI is not processing power, it is the ability to store, manage and retrieve the relentless volumes of data that AI systems generate, consume and multiply ...

The 2026 Observability Survey from Grafana Labs paints a vivid picture of an industry maturing fast, where AI is welcomed with careful conditions, SaaS economics are reshaping spending decisions, complexity remains a defining challenge, and open standards continue to underpin it all ...

The observability industry has an evolving relationship with AI. We're not skeptics, but it's clear that trust in AI must be earned ... In Grafana Labs' annual Observability Survey, 92% said they see real value in AI surfacing anomalies before they cause downtime. Another 91% endorsed AI for forecasting and root cause analysis. So while the demand is there, customers need it to be trustworthy, as the survey also found that the practitioners most enthusiastic about AI are also the most insistent on explainability ...

In the modern enterprise, the conversation around AI has moved past skepticism toward a stage of active adoption. According to our 2026 State of IT Trends Report: The Human Side of Autonomous AI, nearly 90% of IT professionals view AI as a net positive, and this optimism is well-founded. We are seeing agentic AI move beyond simple automation to actively streamlining complex data insights and eliminating the manual toil that has long hindered innovation. However, as we integrate these autonomous agents into our ecosystems, the fundamental DNA of the IT role is evolving ...

AI workloads require an enormous amount of computing power ... What's also becoming abundantly clear is just how quickly AI's computing needs are leading to enterprise systems failure. According to Cockroach Labs' State of AI Infrastructure 2026 report, enterprise systems are much closer to failure than their organizations realize. The report ... suggests AI scale could cause widespread failures in as little as one year — making it a clear risk for business performance and reliability.

The quietest week your engineering team has ever had might also be its best. No alarms going off. No escalations. No frantic Teams or Slack threads at 2 a.m. Everything humming along exactly as it should. And somewhere in a leadership meeting, someone looks at the metrics dashboard, sees a flat line of incidents and says: "Seems like things are pretty calm over there. Do we really need all those people?" ... I've spent many years in engineering, and this pattern keeps repeating ...

SolarWinds Enhances Network Performance Monitor

SolarWinds announced further enhancements to SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor (NPM) that offer the robust network performance monitoring, alerting and reporting capabilities available in ‘Big Four’ enterprise software, but at an affordable, unique-to-industry price.

The latest SolarWinds NPM demonstrates a continued commitment to simplifying network management in the datacenter amidst increasingly complex network challenges.

“SolarWinds focuses on developing products that solve the everyday needs of all IT Professionals – most of whom don’t have deep pockets or time to spare installing or configuring software,” said Chris LaPoint, VP Product Management, SolarWinds. “And as technology advances and networks grow increasingly complex, SolarWinds must preserve our long-standing tradition of providing the powerful capabilities of enterprise-level software you might see in expensive ‘Big Four’ software, but without the need for professional services and at a price that nearly any organization can afford.”

In keeping with the tradition of delivering advanced functionality at a market-differentiating price, SolarWinds NPM has added new baseline threshold calculating functionality, providing the deep visibility and advanced analytics not previously available to network administrators at such a price.

Other features SolarWinds NPM was previously first to introduce to the market for a low cost include enterprise-level wireless support for LAN controllers and thin access points, monitoring for major routing protocols including OSPF and BGP, and a high-availability Failover Engine, all of which have differentiated SolarWinds NPM as a uniquely powerful, yet affordable, network monitoring solution.

New SolarWinds NPM Features:

· Dynamic baseline threshold calculation defines critical network device thresholds based on historical network performance data, enabling users to configure alerts simply and accurately. It automatically gathers baseline data for specified time intervals (weekly or daily) to determine normal operating parameters and calculates thresholds with relevant alerts – good, warning, critical, or down – which allow IT Pros to quickly assess whether a device is up and performing poorly or is about to fail.

· Custom NOC views provide the ability to easily configure and display real-time fault, performance, and availability dashboards tailored to the needs of a network operations center (NOC) of any size.

· Dynamic customizable network mapping enables IT Pros to drag and drop network devices into network maps and automatically view real-time and color-coded link utilization for fully customized and detailed insight into network health beyond up-down status. The Network Weather Map’s dynamic link utilization helps IT Pros identify when the network is approaching critical thresholds so they can prevent network errors and downtime.

· Enhancements to the universal device poller feature allow users to easily add a CPU and memory utilization chart in the SolarWinds NPM dashboard for additional uncommon devices, and includes those new device statistics in monitoring and reporting.

· Support for additional routing protocols and added support for Ruckus and Motorola wireless controllers and devices enable broader network monitoring for IT Pros.

SolarWinds continues to engage with the vast IT Pro community to understand their challenges and needs and to develop software that reflects those needs. thwack is SolarWinds’ online community of over 130,000 IT Pros who share content, ask and answer questions, and request and vote on new SolarWinds product features.

“thwack is second to none,” said Ashley Cotter, applications engineer for Timico who evaluated an early version of SolarWinds NPM’s latest features. “I voted for the new baseline threshold alerting and it’s now included in the software. I can ask SolarWinds senior developers technical questions on a peer level and I know I’m actively impacting SolarWinds product development, and that’s just not something I’ve seen anywhere else.”

The Latest

Like most digital transformation shifts, organizations often prioritize productivity and leave security and observability to keep pace. This usually translates to both the mass implementation of new technology and fragmented monitoring and observability (M&O) tooling. In the era of AI and varied cloud architecture, a disparate observability function can be dangerous. IT teams will lack a complete picture of their IT environment, making it harder to diagnose issues while slowing down mean time to resolve (MTTR). In fact, according to recent data from the SolarWinds State of Monitoring & Observability Report, 77% of IT personnel said the lack of visibility across their on-prem and cloud architecture was an issue ...

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 23, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses the NetOps labor shortage ... 

Technology management is evolving, and in turn, so is the scope of FinOps. The FinOps Foundation recently updated their mission statement from "advancing the people who manage the value of cloud" to "advancing the people who manage the value of technology." This seemingly small change solidifies a larger evolution: FinOps practitioners have organically expanded to be focused on more than just cloud cost optimization. Today, FinOps teams are largely — and quickly — expanding their job descriptions, evolving into a critical function for managing the full value of technology ...

Enterprises are under pressure to scale AI quickly. Yet despite considerable investment, adoption continues to stall. One of the most overlooked reasons is vendor sprawl ... In reality, no organization deliberately sets out to create sprawling vendor ecosystems. More often, complexity accumulates over time through well-intentioned initiatives, such as enterprise-wide digital transformation efforts, point solutions, or decentralized sourcing strategies ...

Nearly every conversation about AI eventually circles back to compute. GPUs dominate the headlines while cloud platforms compete for workloads and model benchmarks drive investment decisions. But underneath that noise, a quieter infrastructure challenge is taking shape. The real bottleneck in enterprise AI is not processing power, it is the ability to store, manage and retrieve the relentless volumes of data that AI systems generate, consume and multiply ...

The 2026 Observability Survey from Grafana Labs paints a vivid picture of an industry maturing fast, where AI is welcomed with careful conditions, SaaS economics are reshaping spending decisions, complexity remains a defining challenge, and open standards continue to underpin it all ...

The observability industry has an evolving relationship with AI. We're not skeptics, but it's clear that trust in AI must be earned ... In Grafana Labs' annual Observability Survey, 92% said they see real value in AI surfacing anomalies before they cause downtime. Another 91% endorsed AI for forecasting and root cause analysis. So while the demand is there, customers need it to be trustworthy, as the survey also found that the practitioners most enthusiastic about AI are also the most insistent on explainability ...

In the modern enterprise, the conversation around AI has moved past skepticism toward a stage of active adoption. According to our 2026 State of IT Trends Report: The Human Side of Autonomous AI, nearly 90% of IT professionals view AI as a net positive, and this optimism is well-founded. We are seeing agentic AI move beyond simple automation to actively streamlining complex data insights and eliminating the manual toil that has long hindered innovation. However, as we integrate these autonomous agents into our ecosystems, the fundamental DNA of the IT role is evolving ...

AI workloads require an enormous amount of computing power ... What's also becoming abundantly clear is just how quickly AI's computing needs are leading to enterprise systems failure. According to Cockroach Labs' State of AI Infrastructure 2026 report, enterprise systems are much closer to failure than their organizations realize. The report ... suggests AI scale could cause widespread failures in as little as one year — making it a clear risk for business performance and reliability.

The quietest week your engineering team has ever had might also be its best. No alarms going off. No escalations. No frantic Teams or Slack threads at 2 a.m. Everything humming along exactly as it should. And somewhere in a leadership meeting, someone looks at the metrics dashboard, sees a flat line of incidents and says: "Seems like things are pretty calm over there. Do we really need all those people?" ... I've spent many years in engineering, and this pattern keeps repeating ...