Hi folks
I had a good chat with a few SolarWinds people today about SWO and it inspired me to create a few FR's.
I've been using iPerf a lot in the Service Provider I run. For those unfamiliar it's a tool that lets you test bandwidth from point A to point B. We use it at our Service Provider to measure performance over SDWAN/MPLS or even point to point wireless setups.
It's a command line tool (or JPerf is the web app equivalent) that telcos use to know how performant a link is.
The user story would be
- I am a sys admin of a large distributed network
- I want to test the bandswidth between site a to site b to see if my links are working as expected
- So that i can let my boss know our network is steady (or hold a telco accountable etc etc)
I can see this being super unique to SWO in that it could sit along side NetPath. Its not just "Is that path available" but "How performant is it". The technology is different to NetPath in that you need a server listening for the traffic and a source device sending it, and it's a windows/linux tool, but i'd be interesting as a DEM tool to people that host their own infrastructure or have servers in Azure that want to see how their remote sites are able to reach their server farms. Again, not just hops, but bandwith available/jitter/loss/latency for one time or persistent monitoring.
Think of it as bringin Engineering Toolset into SWO - it's a tool to help test (read: Observe) your network paths deeper.
The image below is an output of a test. I sent data over a WAN link to a remote server on a link i was expecting to see 1gbps traffic over, but was only getting 100mbps so the telco had something to answer for.
Having the ability to run that test in SWO would save time messing around with deploying Jperf or remembering the damn command line switches. See below 
