We're pleased to announce the release of NPM v11.5 Beta4!  Thanks to the all the feedback we've received from you guys, we've made a slew of adjustments to the features introduced in Beta1, Beta2, and Beta3.  We're excited to see what you think of those adjustments.  I'd like to highlight the following features that are brand new, significantly enhanced, or otherwise worth a look in this latest beta.

Wireless Heatmaps: Now with Client Location!

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.

NPM can now display where your wireless clients are on your heatmaps.  When client location is enabled, NPM periodically polls the wireless infrastructure for client signal information.  NPM then uses triangulation and other techniques to determine where that client is on your floor plan and displays it right in your NPM web console.  As time goes by, NPM periodically polls your wireless infrastructure, recalculates location, and updates the client locations on your maps.

In addition to this new feature, we've continued to refine the algorithm that determines signal strength.  This latest version should be significantly more accurate.

Known beta issue: NPM incorrectly periodically deletes Virtual Site Survey points that have been placed on wireless heat maps.  We'll sort that out before release, of course.

Real World Wireless Heatmap Feedback

We're still very interested in how wireless heatmaps look in your environment, including:

• Do the wireless heatmaps that we're generated meet your expectations?
• How do they compare vs other solutions you may have in place?  Would love to see screenshots of what NPM comes up with vs your existing solution at chris.obrien{at}solarwinds.com and your thoughts on where we're doing great or could be doing better.
• How do the signal strength results match up with the real world?  If you have a laptop at a given location on a map, how does the signal strength the laptop is reporting match up against what the map says it should be?
• If you use Virtual Site Survey, are you able to quickly improve the accuracy and work around RF obstacles to your satisfaction?

Note: currently wireless heat map functionality is only supported for Cisco wireless controllers.

Web Based Alerting

We've continued to refine web based alerting and now have the ability to change an object's status as an alert action.

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.

This means when your Nexus sends NPM a syslog telling you it's shutting down or otherwise having a catastrophic failure, you configure an alert to watch for that event and mark the node as down in your web console when you need it: like right this second.

Also, you may remember this caveat in Beta3:

Note: although Beta3 supports building new rules on the web from scratch, the rules do not fire.

In other words, Beta3 allowed you to create simple or complicated new alerts with functionality beyond what the current Advanced Alert Manager could do, it just wouldn't.. you know... trigger an alert.  Well, we fixed that.  In Beta4, new alerts now fire successfully.

For more details see Rob's post: What We're Working On: New Alerting Engine

Wireless Vendor Support

Wireless heatmap functionality is currently only available for Cisco Wireless controllers.  Our existing wireless monitoring functionality as seen on the Wireless page has been extended to support Aerohive, Aruba Instant AP, and Juniper/Trapeze. Check out the Manage Pollers page to apply them.  We're still looking for feedback on how this is working in more real world environments.  Particularly for Juniper Trapeze.  If you're running Juniper Trapeze in your environment, I'd love to hear from you.  Shoot me a message!

Orion Global Search

We've added a very fancy looking search box to the header of NPM.

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.

We're quite proud of this search box.  In fact, we've gone so far as to build it with a parallel development team and even gave it a version number.

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.

This box allows you to search through SNMP traps, syslog messages, and oh so much more. For more information, check out the post: NPM unified and syslog search preview

Quality of Experience (QoE) Beta

Since we at SolarWinds always have more than one iron in the fire we have another beta for QoE that you may be interested in. The big new feature for this version is application discovery.

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.

No need to define specific applications- we take of it for you.

You'll find a link to the QoE beta bits in the same email that has your NPM beta4 links.  Note that the QoE beta must be installed on a separate server from the NPM beta.

Conclusion

Interested in taking a closer look? Sign up for NPM v11.5 beta here: NPM 11.5 Beta Survey

As a reminder, beta software is for testing only and should not be used in a production environment.