SolarWinds Netflow Traffic Analyzer is a network monitoring tool within the broader SolarWinds ecosystem. It includes core traffic monitoring features, as well as customizable traffic reports and alerts.
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Virtana Platform
Score 8.8 out of 10
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Virtana delivers enterprise-grade deep hybrid infrastructure observability, enabling organizations to achieve visibility and control across their entire IT estate. The platform unifies monitoring of on-premises, cloud, and Kubernetes environments, to transform complex infrastructure management into a strategic advantage. Core Platform Capabilities Deep Infrastructure Observability: · Automated topology discovery and mapping · Real…
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SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer (NTA)
Virtana Platform
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SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer (NTA)
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A device is any running AWS EC2 or Azure VM evaluated by Virtana Optimize in a given month
We use and depend on it for status state of our network gear, switches and routers. It does an excellent job of getting you the details you need to confirm all devices and products are working at the level needed. At times, it does tend to flag network switch ports and/or switches themselves as exceeding their rated capacity when frequently it was a quick blip of high traffic due to downloads, or uploads causing the max'ing of the device. Again, you can adjust the settings but then you adjust it too high and miss real activity. It can become nuisance alerting when you tend to then ignore
Overall I would say that we have been very happy with Zenoss. It has been a great server monitoring tool. There are certain aspects that we would like to expand into, such as Capacity Planning, Network Performance Monitoring, and log analysis. We have coupled Zenoss logs with Splunk for external log management, but would like to start using some of the built-in analysis tools.
The level of customization possible with Network Bandwidth Analyzer is very valuable. Rather than being stuck with a "one-size-fits-all" presentation, an administrator can easily create customized views, reports, and alerts so that users can have a more tailored view of the data provided by Network Bandwidth Analyzer. This has the effect of making the tool more attractive to the end user.
The NetFlow Traffic Analyzer piece of Network Bandwidth Analyzer provides the details on bandwidth usage on the network. More than knowing how much bandwidth is being used, one is provided with detailed information on how that bandwidth is being used. This provides invaluable information for capacity planning and even certain forensic tasks faced by the network engineer.
The ability to produce network maps provides an easy way to create an attractive and functional NOC/SOC view of the entire network. Both technician and the occasional passerby can quickly determine if there are issues to be addressed. The ability to customize a map with background images and custom icons and stencils can make these maps really pop.
The ability to intuitively and quickly serve up specified information up to a dashboard for general “public” consumption, that cycles through several pages of information.
The ability to intuitively set up alerting on bandwidth levels, instead of having to dig through all types of alerts available to find the one needed.
Provide a pricing model based on different support levels: if I want only available update installations, don’t make me pay the same amount as those wanting full support.
As far as rating for usability is concerned I would give 10/10 as NTA is very easy to use. All you need to do is install that module and ask network Team to configure the Netflow towards Server IP. [The] rest is pre-configured and reports are pre-built. Moment you receive the flows from Network all you will have is information about traffic.
I know we could probably pay for it, but it would be nice if we could get to a tier 2 technician faster. Spending a couple of hours on the phone with the level 1 technician, when we have already tried the troubleshooting they are walking us through, is just a waste of time.
The training offered by SolarWinds is some of the best out there. They have several different videos that go into great detail from initial setup to advanced configurations. In addition to the view at your own pace video, they also have live training for customers that focus on a single product and you can ask questions with the folks who develop the software. I have had good success with their live sessions and getting questions answered.
SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer compared to Wireshark and PRTG Network Monitor beats it by just the simple interface. Though all are manual setup, NTA takes it a step further with graphs and reports that analyze the data for you. In comparing to Extrahop from a bandwidth comparison, Extrahop wins but Extrahop is a lot more than just a bandwidth monitoring and cost.
We strongly prefer Metricly for AWS Cost Analysis -- whereas other tools are easier to use on a traditional monitoring basis. To be clear, Merticly's monitoring tools are GREAT, but they require tuning and manual setup that we didn't have the time for on a small Platform Operations team. We have worked closely with Metricly to expand on their cost analysis capabilities, and plan to use them going forward.
Be prepared to answer lots of questions. When people see the data in NTA they are going to want to know why App A is talking to App B. Be ready to explain!
Hand the keys to the NTA kingdom to the network team. They will thank you. Everyone wants to have friends on the network team, right?
Be prepared to invest in some significant compute and storage performance to keep up with your NTA monitoring
Running the latest firmware for your network gear is (often) required to take advantage of all the flow-monitoring. You upgrade regularly, right??
We're a reseller/Integrator, so this question has a somewhat different meaning to our business. For us, Zenoss Cloud allows us to provide a single Cloud-based monitoring platform that can address virtually all our clients' use cases, dramatically simplifying our training and staffing requirements. Instead of training Engineers on several platforms, including the installation of physical hardware/software, we can focus on a single platform.
The faster time-to-deployment and always-on cloud platform is a great fit for DevOps environments and newer software-defined data center platforms. The ability of Zenoss to support these environments solves what has been a major blind spot, slowing adoption of platforms that have been difficult to effectively manage with legacy monitoring platforms.
For clients, the ability to consolidate from multiple prem-based tools to a single cloud-based platform is huge. Eliminating multiple licenses and ongoing hardware & administration costs can show a 1-2 year ROI.