Hi,
Forgive me if this is a really dumb question, but I'm just getting into the network arena in my company. My management would like to take our existing SolarWinds Network Performance Management tool, which I believe is the one we use for assessing current performance, and use historical data to predict, as best as we can, when we will reach certain network thresholds. Essentially, we want to predict which network circuits will likely require an upgrade in the next few months. The stupid question is whether NPM has any capabilities like this, or if the Network Traffic Analyzer does.
From what I understand, we have the existing tools to see how our network is and was performing (much like looking down at a speedometer and seeing how fast you are going), but I am interested in looking at our network performance is going - from a predictive standpoint. That would require whatever tool we use to have basic modeling functionality, even if it just extrapolates our historical patterns of usage. I do realize that we would have to be careful in extrapolating current trends, and certainly, given that the loads on our network vary with different numbers of people and computers accessing more content on our WAN, we would want to be able to update these models quite often.
Can anyone point me in the right direction of what tool that SolarWinds has, if any, to perform such predictive analytics? Having such information, even if it is just directionally accurate, will help better provide us with the data to back up our internal recommendations at our sites. Alternatively, if we see a particular site is particularly overloaded, we would then want to deep drill to understand if it is everyone downloading YouTube videos or if it is something else.
If none of the SolarWinds products currently do this, does anyone know if it is in their product pipeline? Thanks in advance for whatever help you can provide.
Scotty81
