PathSolutions, Inc. is a Silicon Valley, California company that provides network performance monitoring software for both data and VoIP markets.

History

PathSolutions was founded in February 1998 under the name NetLatency, launching network monitoring software capable of automatically discovering information from switches, routers, servers, and other network devices via SNMP without the need for MIB (Management Information Base) files or the need for OID (Object identifier) identification. In July 2007, the company changed its name to PathSolutions.

Technology

PathSolutions products monitor all aspects of network health including link utilization, packet loss, and network device CPU and memory utilization.

The software auto-discovers network devices, interrogates those devices for their SNMP capabilities, and automatically monitors core metrics on all discovered devices as efficiently as possible for the network. This permits all interfaces on a device to be monitored for health and performance information without requiring manual configuration of individual SNMP OIDs.

This permits a 10,000 node network to be completely instrumented within minutes, eliminating weeks of configuration time/effort.

To further reduce support requirements, the solutions are designed to be stand-alone and not require any external supporting technologies like Perl, Java, or complex third-party databases.

Packet requests are performed in an extremely efficient manner due to usage of multiple OID fetches inside each SNMP packet, and liberal usage of SNMP GETBULK.

Products

• SwitchMonitor: Monitors the availability and performance of all network links in the network, as well as CPU and RAM utilization of routers and switches.
• SwitchMonitor VoIP: Provides all SwitchMonitor capabilities, and also the ability to locate where VoIP phones are connected to the network. A call simulator tool is also included to simulate a number of VoIP calls from one point to another and report on latency, jitter, loss, and MOS score. The Call Path feature displays the health of all layer 2 links utilized in passing traffic between two IP addresses.
• SpaceSentinel (discontinued): Monitors free disk space on Windows servers.
• ServiceSentinel (discontinued): Monitors status of Windows services.
• DeviceMonitor (discontinued): Monitors availability of IP devices on the network.
• DeviceMonitorEP (discontinued): Monitors availability of IP devices on the network and includes map interface.

Competitors

PathSolutions SwitchMonitor competes against Concord Network Health, PacketTrap, SolarWinds Orion Network Performance Monitor, and Cacti.

PathSolutions SwitchMonitor VoIP competes against Apparent Networks? AppCritical, Brix Networks, Empirix, NetIQ, and NetQOS.

External links

• Pathsolutions Official site
• Pathsolutions CTO?s blog

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