by Hovhannes Avoyan
| Nov 04, 2009
Here’s some interesting news about how companies are innovating with network monitoring services, which is a subject that’s near and dear to my heart!
I read recently that Austin, TX-based SolarWinds Worldwide LLC is offering IP telephony monitoring that is designed to manage service level agreements over WANs on Cisco routers.
It’s called Orion IP SLA Manager, and it’s aimed at companies using voice over IP at more than one site. And even though Cisco’s Internetwork Operating System (IOS) already has a VoIP service monitor, SolarWinds Orion is supposed to help managers configure their network more quickly. And the product gives customers a “dashboard” view of usage and other statistics.
Without Orion, IT administrators would have to use a command line interface to configure every operation they wanted to monitor. Besides, they’d only get raw statistics, too. And that would require further labor to analyze. In essence, Orion would automate setup of IP SLA across whatever routers a company deemed necessary, plus provide a neat look at stats.
What was most encouraging to me, when I read about Orion, was a statement by Sanjay Castelino, SolarWinds’ senior director of product marketing. He indicated that Orion was driven by increasing customer demand for all types of monitoring services. “Customers are asking if I can do more to measure site to site performance beyond VoIP,” he said, in the article.
For instance, the company also has a monitoring product that reports IP faults and traffic analysis reports and gives administrators a view of complex, multi-vendor networks. Users can schedule scans and split those scans into subnets.
SolarWinds is one of the many IT companies today that are innovating and creating new monitoring services. And, as corporations demand ever-more efficient and productive computing from their IT folks, monitoring services will become increasingly important.
Today, IT managers want to set up their IT monitoring quickly and easily, and believe that’s what’s really behind the growth of monitoring services. To learn more about how network, website and other monitoring services can be a snap, visit us at Paid Monitor.
