Overall Satisfaction with SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer (NTA)
Used primarily by the network engineering team, backed up by the server and storage team, NTA is used to identify network (primarily WAN) bottlenecks and identify the largest users and what type of traffic they generate. We will often find one user streaming video hogging bandwidth, but we can also identify and monitor chatty back-end processes such as Exchange DAG replication.
- Graphical display of bandwidth usage over time, and split out by largest users.
- Ability to create custom alerts based on network traffic patterns.
- Ability to quickly identify the largest user(s) on a link.
- It seems to have trouble reverse-resolving internal devices, despite being run on a domain-member server. We often get IP addresses for node identifiers where we would like to see the server or workstation name.
- With NTA, we are able to identify and remediate network bandwidth hogs and have avoided upgrading circuits when we found the usage was frivolous.
We already have several other Solar Winds products, so we did not compare NTA to competing products. We are trying to keep down the number of different products to support and maintain with limited staff.