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Question

Hi all. I'm only slightly familiar with SolarWinds products so please bear with me. I've used a couple of free utilities over the years but that's about it.

I just received and email that caught my eye, finding bandwidth hogs, using NPM and NTA.

1. I'm curious if there's a quick sentence or two answer as to why I would need both apps? (Don't want to take up anyone's time)

And also as a field engineer I want to know how applicable this is to me. I'll explain...I walk into new and existing clients all the time, we provide IT services to small businesses that aren't big enough to have their own IT support.

The most common issue I have to deal with, "Our internet is really slow, no idea why just all of a sudden..."

2. Would I be able to walk into a customer's office, possibly having never been there before, and use these 2 utilities from my laptop to help diagnose the network issues?

Or are these meant to be installed in a single location, or licensing would prevent me from using at various locations, and so on..

Thank you!

byrona · Accepted Answer

NPM and NTA are server applications designed to be setup in a single environment and ran continuously for years.

If you are looking for a laptop application(s) for going from one site to another diagnosing problems I would recommend you take a look at the SolarWinds Engineers Toolset. It has a lot of the functionality you will find in NPM and NTA but is more designed as a desktop/laptop application for situations like you are talking about here. You could also check out some of the SolarWinds free tools for this as well.

The Engineers Toolset really is a toolbox of different monitoring and troubleshooting software, you have a bunch of real-time monitoring tools as well as things like Switch Port mappers and Port Scanners.

Hope this helps!