This is NetPath™,
a whole new way to find the problems that are affecting your users
and solve them quickly.
NetPath’s advanced probing allows you
to troubleshoot network issues and performance,
whether they are on-premises,
in a hybrid network, or in the cloud.
NetPath detects the network path from a source computer
all the way to the destination service.
Here, we see how our path to Google.com goes through our network,
then our ISP, through some internet transit providers,
and finally through Google's own network
before reaching the final destination server.
Up until now, Traceroute was the only solution
for identifying the paths
that packets used across the internet.
Unfortunately traceroute is usually blocked,
cannot account for multiple paths or redundancy,
and does not continuously monitor.
If we run traceroute to Google.com,
you'll quickly see that once we leave our internal network,
we have no visibility into the hop-by-hop performance.
NetPath, on the other hand,
continuously monitors complex multi-path networks and understands redundancy,
keeps track of past results, alerts you to changes,
and can show you the health of multiple paths at the same time.
Building these paths is easy.
Navigate to the NetPath Services page
and click 'Create New Service.'
Fill in a hostname or IP, any TCP port,
optionally a nickname, and a probing interval.
We'll talk about how to pick the right probing interval
in just a moment.
Next, we can select to use the probe on our
main polling engine or deploy a probe to a remote location.
The probe is a small piece of software
that runs the probing operations.
The probe is always the source of your path.
Click 'Create' and in a few minutes you'll have your path.
That's it.
Let's talk about selecting the right probing interval.
Longer probing intervals give NetPath more time
to find paths and measure their performance.
Simple land paths can be done very quickly,
while longer complex paths,
like those over the internet, take longer.
Shorter probing intervals give a more granular view
of your network, in terms of time.
If a problem occurred during a five minute window,
a five minute probing interval will find it,
where a 30 minute probing interval may not.
Shorter intervals also take up more storage
and cause more strain on your probes, pollers,
and the rest of you SolarWinds infrastructure.
You can always get more hardware,
but good engineers use only the resources they need.
If you're looking for the fastest results,
our recommendation is start with five minutes for land paths
and 10 minutes with internet paths.
Now that it's configured, let's take a look
at how to troubleshoot using Netpath.
After discovering the path, NetPath measures
the performance characteristics of each network node
and each network link, making it easy to spot slowdowns.
Let's go to a path that we've already built, Salesforce.com.
Here we can see this router has two incoming links,
only one link is experiencing increased delay.
By correlating real transit impact to the wealth
of information from SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor,
NetPath is able to highlight the root cause of the problem.
If you have other products, such as Network Traffic Analyzer
and Network Configuration Manager installed,
their data will show up in the graph when relevant as well.
In this example, we see a config change occurred
at the same time as the problem started.
Selecting the issue shows the config comparison
from Network Configuration Manager.
If we scroll down, we will see that a traffic shaper has
been inserted that is probably the cause of the slowdown.
Selecting any node allows you to navigate
to Node Details for that node.
The same is true for interfaces.
NetPath also provides visibility into internet paths.
In our example path to Salesforce.com,
we can see what companies we're depending on for Salesforce
to work properly for us.
By clicking on their network, we'll get an expanded view
of the routers and links inside.
If the ISP were experiencing any issues, we can click
on the node to obtain their contact information.
Now I can call them
and provide precise, actionable information
about the problem we're seeing in their network.
Ever have a user tell you service was down earlier,
but it seems fine now?
With NetPath monitoring your services,
you can travel back in time to see
what the network behavior was at the time of the outage.
The timeline across the bottom gives you
the end-to-end performance for the path.
If you notice an anomaly, you can click the interval
on the chart to see what the path looked like
and how it was performing at that time.
You can also use the forward and back arrows
to move through intervals.
Holding down the arrow will play through the intervals,
so you can see how the network changes over time.
NetPath can also help you understand
your network's performance,
but in a different way than you're used to.
Traditional monitoring tools test from a single point
in your network to the various infrastructure components,
but the most important thing your network is doing,
is delivering services to users.
NetPath monitors connectivity from your users
to the services they care about.
NetPath then determines what infrastructure is in the path,
where traffic slowdowns are occurring,
and provides additional infrastructure data
only when it appears to be related to a real problem.