SolarWinds for Cisco Environments

In general, our products are vendor-agnostic, and this is important to us.
Using Network Performance Monitor (NPM) as an example: If a vendor is following the SNMP RFC, we can retrieve data, correlate KPIs, and forecast situations.
However, sometimes, this is not enough, just like eating half a portion of pasta carbonara.


As CiscoRegistered is the most popular network vendor in our customer base, we focus on providing a little more information out-of-the-box and make (work) life more comfortable, such as via support for non-RFC OIDs. 
Also, we added support for CLI/API access to collect statistics that are not available at all via SNMP.


Let’s jump into our DeLorean and travel back in NPM’s history to…five years or so!

10.4        Hardware Health

10.7        Support for EIGRP and VRF

11.5        Wireless Heatmaps
12.0        Cisco SwitchStackRegistered

12.1        Meraki
12.2        Network InsightTm for Cisco ASA

12.3        Network Insight for Cisco NexusRegistered

12.4        Support for ACI

Some of these features have been around for ages. I arrived just before the NPM 11.0 release, so for me, things like hardware health have been there “forever.”
The SwitchStack support was the first highlight for me, followed by the ASA integration in both NPM and Network Configuration Manager (NCM).

By the way, do you know that most of the features in the list are based on community requests?


On top of that, other OrionRegistered Platform modules support VOIP, DNS, and DHCP solutions from Cisco, and you can attach those with a few clicks.
Finally, there is NetFlow. Over the years we have added support for NBAR2 and WLC flows into our NetFlow Traffic Analyzer (NTA).


There are various statistics out there discussing Cisco’s market share and how it changed over time, and I don’t want to get in an “I don’t like them at all” discussion. Trust me, I’ve had enough of those already. I prefer JunOS when it comes down to the CLI.
But also, I love both pasta carbonara and all`Amatriciana, and there is nothing wrong with it.


Still, Cisco is basically everywhere. You guys keep on using it, so we keep on adding new features into our network products to help you support your infrastructure.

So, the good news is that we’re attending Cisco Live! EMEA in Barcelona. You will find us in booth S20A starting on Monday, January 28, and the code word to remember is “T-shirt.”

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  • Thank you for this information.

    I know that SolarWinds is trying to be vendor agnostic and to balance that product development with what your base is asking for is a big request.

    I see that the API direction is going to be very big in networking.  With the SD-WAN movement people are starting to see benefits for a full SDN implementation.  This means more API calls to measure and manage the network.   The day is coming where i know I will be spending more and more time in an API than on the CLI and I appreciate you pointing this out.   I know that Palo Alto and Silver Peak lean more on APIs than the SNMP monitoring for the deeper details into what they are doing.   I have seen the changes to SolarWinds over the years and do appreciate it.

    Again thank you for this explanation.

Comment
  • Thank you for this information.

    I know that SolarWinds is trying to be vendor agnostic and to balance that product development with what your base is asking for is a big request.

    I see that the API direction is going to be very big in networking.  With the SD-WAN movement people are starting to see benefits for a full SDN implementation.  This means more API calls to measure and manage the network.   The day is coming where i know I will be spending more and more time in an API than on the CLI and I appreciate you pointing this out.   I know that Palo Alto and Silver Peak lean more on APIs than the SNMP monitoring for the deeper details into what they are doing.   I have seen the changes to SolarWinds over the years and do appreciate it.

    Again thank you for this explanation.

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