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SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer (NTA)

SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer (NTA)

Overview

What is SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer (NTA)?

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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Recent Reviews

TrustRadius Insights

Intuitive User Interface: Users have consistently praised the intuitive and easy-to-operate user interface of the services. Many reviewers …
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Pricing

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What is SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer (NTA)?

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.

Entry-level set up fee?

  • Setup fee optional
For the latest information on pricing, visithttps://www.solarwinds.com/onlinequotes…

Offerings

  • Free Trial
  • Free/Freemium Version
  • Premium Consulting/Integration Services

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What is ExtraHop Reveal(x)?

ExtraHop now offers Reveal(x), the company's network traffic analysis (NTA) and anomaly detection security application.

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Product Details

What is SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer (NTA)?

SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer (NTA) allows the multi-vendor monitoring of network traffic flow records, the discovery of traffic patterns, and avoidance of bandwidth hogs. As an add-on to SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor (NPM), NTA helps optimize spend on bandwidth by better understanding the who and what of bandwidth consumption boosting your network traffic analysis capabilities. Trace and monitor bandwidth usage of application or protocol patterns over months, days, or minutes by drilling down into any network element supporting a variety of network traffic flow standards (NetFlow, sFlow, J-Flow, IPFIX, and NetStream). Gain real-time deep Network Insights for Cisco, F5, and Palo Alto to identify critical issues quickly all in one easy to use interface.


NTA’s core features include bandwidth monitoring, application traffic monitoring, network traffic analysis, malicious traffic identification, performance analysis, and error root cause identification. The product also offers customizable traffic reports and alerts, including measuring the effectiveness of traffic prioritization policies. It is designed to integrate with other SolarWinds monitoring and management products.

Download a free trial today: https://www.solarwinds.com/netflow-traffic-analyzer/registration


SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer (NTA) Features

  • Supported: Tightly integrates with SolarWinds NPM providing valuable insights into network bandwidth consumption.
  • Supported: Monitor bandwidth use by application, protocol, and IP address group. Collects and analyzes flow data from multiple vendors, including NetFlow v5 and v9, Juniper® J-Flow™, sFlow®, Huawei® NetStream™, and IPFIX.
  • Supported: Application traffic alerting, alerts you if an application traffic suddenly increases, decreases, or disappears completely.
  • Supported: Analyze network traffic patterns over months, days, or minutes by drilling down into any network element.
  • Supported: PerfStack™ cross-stack network data correlation. Accelerate identification of root cause by dragging-and-dropping network performance metrics on a common timeline for immediate visual correlation across all your network data and NetFlow analytics.
  • Supported: Advanced application recognition allows you to identify which applications and categories consume the most bandwidth for better network traffic visibility with NBAR2 support.
  • Supported: Customizable network traffic reports at your finger tips. Create, schedule, and deliver in-depth network traffic analysis and bandwidth reports with just a few clicks.
  • Supported: Monitor Wireless LAN Controller traffic to keep tabs on applications and clients utilizing bandwidth on your wireless network.
  • Supported: Cisco Meraki wireless traffic monitoring.
  • Supported: CBQoS policy optimization measures the effectiveness of pre- and post-policy traffic levels per class map to determine if QoS policies are working as planned.
  • Supported: Malicious or malformed traffic flow identification with port 0 monitoring.
  • Supported: Network Insight™ for Palo Alto Networks® includes collection of flow from Palo Alto firewalls to show flow through nodes and interfaces

SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer (NTA) Videos

Learn more: https://slrwnds.com/NTA_Overview Network traffic visibility is more important than ever. SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer expands that visibility to include IPv6 flow records, Palo Alto devices, and provides deployment flexibility and support for use of Azure® SQL as a data repository.
Learn More: https://slrwnds.com/SWLab76 Whether you’re curious if flow monitoring might be helpful, or you’ve been coalescing IPFIX streams of network-activity goodness for years, IT’s reliable, old hand has learned a few new tricks. In this episode, Head Geeks™ Patrick Hubba...
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SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer (NTA) Competitors

SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer (NTA) Technical Details

Deployment TypesOn-premise
Operating SystemsWindows
Mobile ApplicationNo

SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer (NTA) Downloadables

Frequently Asked Questions

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.

Progress WhatsUp Gold, ThousandEyes, and NETSCOUT nGeniusONE are common alternatives for SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer (NTA).

Reviewers rate Support Rating highest, with a score of 8.1.

The most common users of SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer (NTA) are from Enterprises (1,001+ employees).
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Comparisons

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Reviews and Ratings

(171)

Community Insights

TrustRadius Insights are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, 3rd-party data sources. Have feedback on this content? Let us know!

Intuitive User Interface: Users have consistently praised the intuitive and easy-to-operate user interface of the services. Many reviewers have stated that they found it simple to navigate through the system, making tasks easy to perform.

High Level of Customization: The Network Bandwidth Analyzer's level of customization has been highly valued by users. Numerous reviewers have expressed their appreciation for being able to create customized views, reports, and alerts tailored to their specific needs. This feature allows users to personalize the tool according to their requirements.

Detailed Bandwidth Information: The NetFlow Traffic Analyzer component has received praise for providing detailed information on bandwidth usage and capacity planning. Several users have described this feature as invaluable for forensic tasks. They appreciate having access to in-depth insights into network traffic, which helps them effectively manage and troubleshoot issues.

Confusing and Not Intuitive User Interface: Many users have found the user interface of the software to be confusing and not intuitive, making it difficult to navigate and perform tasks quickly. The lack of clear organization and unintuitive design elements has been a common frustration among reviewers.

Lack of Specific Packet Details: Customers have expressed a need for more specific packet details and additional information on web traffic. They desire more granular insights into individual packets, such as source/destination IP addresses, ports, protocols, and payload data. This level of detail would enable them to better analyze network traffic patterns and troubleshoot issues effectively.

Unintuitive Alerting Setup: Setting up alerting on bandwidth levels has proven to be unintuitive for users. It requires navigating through multiple menus and options, which can be time-consuming and confusing. Reviewers suggest streamlining the process by providing clearer instructions or a more intuitive interface specifically tailored for configuring alerts based on bandwidth thresholds.

Users have recommended using Netflow Analyzer for visibility of network data transfer, traffic monitoring, and bandwidth usage. They suggest trying the free trial of Netflow Traffic Analyzer for 30 days to experience its features. Users also recommend Netflow Traffic Analyzer for managing switch and router configurations, as well as pushing config changes to multiple devices. According to them, SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer is the best tool available for monitoring network traffic and they appreciate its solid performance. Users find NetFlow Traffic Analyzer to be a cost-effective solution for collecting netflows and a great addition to existing toolsets. They emphasize its compatibility with other SolarWinds products and regular updates. Additionally, users recommend checking if Netflow Analyzer meets specific needs before purchasing, as there may be more advanced and affordable options available. They suggest trying the evaluation version to see its benefits and conducting a proof of concept to test it in a network environment. In summary, users find SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer to be a useful and easy-to-use tool that delivers on its promises, making it suitable for companies with large networks and organizations of all sizes.

Attribute Ratings

Reviews

(26-50 of 61)
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September 02, 2020

SolarWinds NTA Review

Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
SolarWinds NTA has helped tremendously. As we are in the healthcare industry, all of our hardware, software, and others are very important to run with a very limited amount of disruptions. When things go wrong our teams need to see why, when, and how to improve so it does not happen next time. This is where SolarWinds NTA comes in.
  • Monitor interface's network bandwith
  • Traffic patterns
  • Enhance bandwidth before outages occur
  • Bring down the price
  • Tighten up CBQoS
  • Enable Linux equipment
SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer is best suited for a company that is very dependent on fewer outages because it costs them a lot while an outage happens. It would not be the best for a small company that doesn't handle high bandwidth needs.
Andrew Yudin, MBA/CCNP | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use it to extract flows from all of our routers and analyze traffic.
  • Integrates well with Network Performance Monitor (NPM) and other SolarWinds tools
  • Combines multiple data streams into a single user-friendly graph format.
  • Provides complete visibility into the network traffic flows.
  • Requires a good amount of DB resources in order to function smoothly.
  • Web interface needs to be refreshed to include more interactive charts and graphs.
  • Lack of troubleshooting methods
Solarwinds Netflow Traffic Analyzer is well suited in a small, medium, or large network environments. It is capable of monitoring multiple flow data types such as Netflow, Sflow, JFlow, NetStream, or IPFIX. It is a very powerful tool, which helped my organization to track down and troubleshoot a number of issues.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
It is used by a Department - Network Monitoring Team.
One of the important use case is it helps us to identify any outage in network, real-time and team responds immediately.
This reduces the business impact, we being a customer service entity.
  • It gives bandwidth information on interfaces basis.
  • Helps in identifying any system if infected and team can isolate that endpoint.
  • Denial-of-service can be identified and stopped. One of the key aspects again.
  • Reporting and integrating with other tools like NAC solution.
  • Can adapt ML/AI going forward.
  • Auditing can be improved and self analysis within tool itself.
SolarWinds can be well suited for industry that caters to customers across the globe and has lots of data to deal with from different customers.
This would help to monitor and prioritize the data to be picked, flag the service provider and reduce the impact on customer. Best suited for service provider who cater to financial sector as they are time bound revert expected and business is highly volatile.
This would not serve the purposes of a small organization where manual resources can handle the load and troubleshoot easily alone.
July 14, 2020

SolarWinds NTA

Thomas Osborne | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
NTA is being used in our internal IT department to monitor all of our VM's as well as networking devices such as switches, ASA's, routers, etc. The problem that NTA addresses is real-time visibility into our network. Being able to see what devices are up and what traffic is passing through is crucial for business.
  • Traffic passing.
  • Isolate user data.
  • Integration.
It is well suited to those who would like to gather more statistics on what kind of traffic your network is passing. There are many applications that NTA could come in and provide help with. We enjoy being able to see quickly and accurately what our networking devices are doing with the traffic in our organization.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We searched for a Netflow analyzer to help operations to understand how data are going through network.
As we already use SolarEWnds (NPM, NCM, ...), NTA was a logical solution as it reuses all polled devices.
  • Good integration with other SolarWinds modules (NPM, NCM, IPAM, etc.).
  • Easy to install and use.
  • Auto discover of interfaces.
  • Troubleshooting is not easy in cases of NTA problems.
  • Static interface.
  • Not easy to cross data between nodes.
It's the natural solution if you already have SolarWinds modules as it's requiring NPM.
Even if it's not really user-friendly you can add alerts for traffic, QoS support must be increased to be useful.

Easy to use for network diagnostic or traffic knowledge even without a real-time console.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
SolarWinds Network Bandwidth Analyzer is used by the internal Infrastructure department as our go-to tool for analyzing, tracing, and documenting the network infrastructure. This is also the application we utilize to gather all necessary information and metrics needed to diagram the network infrastructure. This is a piece of software that is utilized on a daily basis for troubleshooting and to ensure adherence to regulatory and compliance requirements.
  • Monitoring & Alerting
  • Documentation
  • Visualization of traffic and executive level reporting
  • Would like to see additional enhancement to the web interface
SolarWinds Network Bandwidth Analyzer would be very well suited for users from the network administration through middle management, up to VP-level users, who are responsible for network and infrastructure operations within the company. SolarWinds Network Bandwidth Analyzer is used as an initial troubleshooting point for the network admin team, as well as M&A for all levels. Middle and VP-level users would benefit from, not only M&A, but the graphical reporting features often requested by upper management.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We have been using SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer for quite some time at our organization for monitoring bandwidth and traffic patterns.
We use it organization-wide to monitor users or applications with high bandwidth utilization. These helps us to maximize the up-time of our network and applications leading to smooth and fast access to the internet and data center applications.

Our overall experience with this tool is very positive and has helped us a lot in keeping our infrastructure lag free.
  • Monitoring Network Bandwidth is the best feature we see in this tool as its detailed insights help us in allocating bandwidth to users correctly.
  • It can be deployed very easily, efficiently and quickly. We deployed it in a few hours at our organization.
  • It is good at finding Hosts or IP addresses that communicate more or frequently in the network.
  • The dashboard is a little complex for a layman to understand. I remember when I was new to this product I had a difficult time in understanding the traffic patterns.
  • Technical Support Assistance is quite complex and difficult to obtain and it has a lot of room for improvement.
  • Training material is not easy to find. More training videos would be appreciated.
SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer is well suited in use cases like:

  1. Bandwidth Monitoring for Internet, MPLS & Point to Point Links.
  2. Realtime performance analysis for networking equipment like switches, routers, firewalls, virtual machines, etc where we can monitor performance of components like CPU, RAM, Storage, etc.
  3. Identifying varied traffic patterns and top talkers in an environment with ease and good accuracy.
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer is used to analyze the network-related traffic across the organization.
  • SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer gives network packet drops.
  • SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer provides very good stats on routers, firewalls, etc.
  • It helps us analyze the network flow very well.
  • Every thing regarding SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer is manual.
  • We need to put a lot of things together on our own while debugging issues.
SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer monitors our network and discovers traffic patterns that help us figure out issues related to our network. There is a lot of things NTA cannot do. Its scope is limited and can be improved by adding more analysis data.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Used across the organization by collecting data from the SNMP and WMI sources to combine into a set of data to analyze. Bandwidth monitoring is also a great asset to have to keep an eye on your environment.
  • Very friendly dashboard to show basic users and upper management network results.
  • Can help the troubling problem of "everything is slow" and help give some answers to the root cause.
  • Can eat up a lot of resources and get slow at times.
  • Somewhat pricey but you get a lot for your buck.
Useful for large environments with a good budget and multiple points of failure.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer is being used by our IT department to monitor and detect network issues and to troubleshoot.
  • Provides up to date, real time network statistics.
  • Shows node outages for pinpointing issues.
  • I don't have any suggestions.
Well suited for analyzing and pinpointing issues with network connectivity.
February 10, 2020

NetFlow in education flow

Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
It is being used across all our sites to monitor our bandwidth usage.
  • User-friendly dashboard.
  • Metered at a glance statistics.
  • Phone app integration.
  • AD integration for 801.x port utilization.
The product is well suited for multi-site star topology networks where bandwidth is shared. At a single site, it would be less appropriate as you wouldn't need as many resources to monitor your network.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer has been set up on our core switch to collect all traffic data, and it helps us to see who is using the most bandwidth. It has been used across the whole organization. It addresses the issue of when one user on one our site is creating too much traffic. SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer helps us to find the culprit right way.
  • One day we were having complaints about one of our sites. The internet was very slow. SolarWinds NetFlow helped us to see why it was slow. It was due to a computer that was getting re-imaged.
  • Helps us to find the culprit who is hogging the network bandwidth.
  • It has been hard to set it up to collect autonomous system conversations.
SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer is well suited to find the culprit who is hogging your network traffic.
January 21, 2020

SolarWinds Netflow

Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We used SolarWinds Netflow Traffic Analyzer to monitor our traffic across a geographically diverse company. We rely heavily on on our internet facing applications and being able to monitor them is critical to fixing issues. Netflow monitoring has worked well for our organization.
  • Detailed
  • Accurate
  • Database slow to load feed
  • Overly complicated to set up SolarWinds in general
We used SolarWinds to monitor our netflow traffic. The product works good but can be a bit of a pain to set up and floods you with too much info if using the defaults. With a good setup from the start it is a handy product.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
This is used across the organization to monitor traffic and alert on issues. It helps us with long-term planning growth moving forward as well.
  • Monitor Traffic over time
  • Alert when there are issues
  • None
This could be used effectively by any organization that has multiple sites. It gives you incredible real-time visibility into your network.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We're using SolarWinds Netflow Traffic Analyzer to monitor network traffic, with an emphasis on identifying bottlenecks and remediating those pain points to improve performance. We're also using it as a tool during the incident process, where we can see potential impacts to systems and processes. The primary business problem that we're addressing is performance, and that manifesting itself as slowness in our branches, contact center, or at employee points of interaction with the technical environment.
  • Overall database system health monitoring is a quick check for incident management.
  • Database dashboard view is very helpful for starting detailed issue analysis.
  • The package could do better with actual transaction level monitoring
  • If you are using a mainframe, your options for monitoring are very limited
The single best use case that we've been able to exploit is tuning and monitoring our core databases in an extremely complex technical environment. Our systems are outward facing, with multiple endpoints, and very large traffic volumes with largely unpredictable patterns -- that causes Oracle stress that is difficult to manage and predict, even using the best of the database optimization tools out there. When we've got problems, we can look at the dashboards and easily rule in, or out, that our database is part of any end user experience problem.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
SolarWinds Netflow Traffic Analyzer is one of the most powerful tools in the organization. It is used by several departments that belong to IT specifically Communications, Systems and Services Monitoring, and Data Center. Our organization uses Netflow to identify traffic volumes that may be affecting production. Also through Netflow we realize in which links we need to increase bandwidths. Among the difficulties we have experienced is that not all devices in our infrastructure support this solution and this has limited us to expand our traffic analysis.
  • It allows you to have visibility of the volume of traffic that is going through your infrastructure.
  • The possibility of remedying events that may be affecting the infrastructure.
  • Control of the different media analyzing the type of traffic that passes through the critical points.
  • We have difficulties in areas such as other platforms that find it difficult to interpret the results.
  • There are areas such as Data Center where it is not considered as a primary tool in their work.
  • The results that this tool can provide are not considered in the budgets of critical areas.
I consider areas such as telecommunications are the most benefited with this tool because of the quick results it can obtain. Development areas can benefit but on a smaller scale and in isolated cases. I do not recommend it for administrative areas, it would not provide any information that provides specific solutions for its purposes.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use SolarWinds Netflow Traffic Analyzer (NTA) across all our Cisco routers and switches on premise in our primary office location as well as our call center locations. It helps us monitor and track down any possible network issues such as congestion, packe tloss, speed issues, down equipment etc. It has been very valuable over the years in that regard.
  • Intuitive GUI
  • Easy to add equipment to the product
  • Ability to assign where equipment is actually located on a map
  • Sometimes the GUI gets very slow and the server needs restarted
  • Notifications are sometimes a little lagged for unknown reasons
  • Ability to customize the GUI more would be nice
I could see this product being useful in most environments, but you could probably get by without it in small offices. For a medium to large business with dozens or hundreds of networking devices it's a must to have a product such as this. If something were to fail down the line or have issues, without something like this you may be fishing for the problem for a long time.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We support and monitor 17+ medical offices and 4 administrative offices. We have multiple carriers that provide redundant WAN connectivity as well as dedicated internet and shared internet. We have a number of medical facilities that transfer large mission-critical radiology images across the WAN. It is imperative that we monitor and support these WAN connections to ensure we are meeting our SLA with the physicians and staff. NetFlow Traffic Analyzer helps us to drill down to the detail necessary to resolve any issues.
  • It provides visual alerts that indicate a possible problem, or high latency.
  • It allows us to drill down to see one-on-one conversations.
  • NTA provides granular details on bandwidth consumption and latency.
  • I have no negatives to address at this point.
NTA helps us to find bandwidth hogs, as well as latency, that occurs in live-view. NTA also provides historic information on possible outages as well as latency with a timeline.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
It is being used by IT to monitor and troubleshoot network traffic.
  • Monitors traffic for internal and external circuits
  • It just works
  • Very large install footprint depending on how much data is being captured
Monitors internet bound traffic very well where a large part of the round trip is being governed by an outside entity (ie. ISP).
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
It's primarily used by myself, and occasionally I will provide network analysis to others on their request. It can provide data on how our current data links are used wherever it has been set up correctly.
  • It can provide details on a particular link in terms of network utilization and traffic flow.
  • SolarWinds Netflow Traffic Analyzer can be difficult to set up and requires correct settings on router interfaces at egress points.
  • It works with most Cisco devices, but I have had difficulty setting it up on other vendor's equipment, e.g., Fortinet
It should be deployed at network ingress/egress points where network traffic flow information is desired to be gathered — best used on routers. I don't typically use it on switches.
Nandini pallipamu | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
This is the best network analyzing software available on the market for the price! The level of analyzing and user-friendly GUI are the best parts of this software.
  • This software helps us analyze bandwidth spikes in detail which helps us capacity plan for site moves or expansions.
  • This software helps us monitor user activity.
  • This software helps us monitor application traffic to a granular level by setting up pie charts and bar charts.
  • We use this software to alert the incident management team of circuit cuts or node unavailability thereby engaging the NOC team asap.
  • NTA could use a good PDF download feature. Right now, we cannot download pie charts in PDF format.
We use this software to alert the incident management team of circuit cuts or node unavailability thereby engaging the NOC team asap. This is the best software to alert teams of network abnormalities. It is less appropriate for documentation since we cannot download the incidents or chart in a PDF format and create incident logs.
Jennifer Aguilar | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
My business has a very defined focus and the critical infrastructure that is monitored by the SolarWinds suite. I utilize Netflow Traffic Analyzer to monitor performance of my environment and to spot anomalies within the traffic flows. The tool has pushed out phenomenal data for security analysis and overall troubleshooting. I like having NetFlow to complement the suite of tools I use to protect and defend my environment. I can't put a price on the tool; pretty much like having another FTE on the payroll, you just need to renew the maintenance! I guess that means that it is cheaper than another FTE, and it does not talk back!
  • It is very easy to set up the endpoints for Netflow; SolarWinds can take flow data from any configurable network device. I use a sFlow configuration on Brocade and NetFlow configuration on Cisco; both sources dump and report just fine into SolarWinds Netflow Traffic Analyzer.
  • I absolutely love the traffic analytics that are produced; the graphs are very important when talking to management, as pictures seem to tell a thousand words.
  • SolarWinds Netflow does a great job collecting and reporting about my what network bandwidth is being used for and by whom. I had no idea that I moved as much data around until I started gathering Netflow data.
  • Once you have a baseline picture of data and data movers, you can start picking up on antimonies in your live environment. Applications causing congestion are generally the culprits.
  • I am having a difficult time coming up with any specific recommendations to make SolarWinds Netflow better. I love the fact that the community of users from SolarWinds drives product development. I am a member of the Solarwinds THWACK community and have found so many useful resources and templates. The users drive the success of the product… what a concept!
Unbelievable tool to find those employees that just will not adhere to the rules put forth regarding the streaming of media; I am talking about those bandwidth hogs that treat your work network like their home! I have flows coming in from both mission-critical and non-mission critical locations to keep tabs on absolutely all traffic in my environment. I can't think of a scenario in my business line where it would not be appropriate to capture traffic flows for analysis.

At this point in time, almost all the anomalies I have detected have been humans utilizing the network for personal use. I have used Solarwinds Netflow Traffic Analyzer and SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer together to get a very pesky custom application re-configured due to poor performance and disruptions on the network. Wonderful tools to monitor technology and applications can only contribute to your success as an IT pro!
September 18, 2019

Netflow Traffic Notes

Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We used it in our Dept for Netflow traffic from our Cisco devices in our data centers since we are an enterprise-sized network. Gives us a view of what is going on in the network flow.
  • End-user application
  • The protocols that are using too much bandwidth
  • Traffic reports
  • Good layer 3 network views
  • Well, one thing that needs to be offered should be layer 2 capabilities such as VLANs, etc.
  • Pricing can be a little better for licensing
  • Should make it a stand-alone, no modules installation
I think it would work great in all networks. It's a great product, just needs a few tweaks to make better. If you have no product at all this would be great to see what is going on in the network as it gives you some idea of what you can do for improvements to your Infrastructure.
August 31, 2019

Flow of your life.

Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Network Traffic Analyzer has been a valuable tool for us in analyzing network traffic. It was easy to implement and customize to our needs. It provides insights from multiple vendors reporting flows through their nodes.
  • Flow information. It knows where your devices' traffic is.
  • Create reports.
  • Manage devices with an easy way to see the flow.
  • They need to improve how to handle Layer 2 flow.
  • There are user interface issues.
It's very useful for large networks, DataCenters, etc. It is a life saver when you need to know the flow for Servers and VMs.
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Solarwinds for real time monitoring of network devices and servers at multiple locations. Solarwinds can be one of the best monitoring solutions around, though it is very modular so it can be pricey to get all the features.
  • Real time
  • Alerts
  • All-in-one solution
  • More Features
  • Price
  • Initial setup can be overwhelming
The ability to have config backups and use those backups for config checks. We have port-security on a set of switch ports and we can check every night that those ports still have it configured. As well when no security policies are put in place we can check all routers for the new config and make sure it is there. SolarWinds tends to be slow and unwieldy. Maintaining nodes to make sure that everything is monitored tends to be labor intensive. The UI needs a major overhaul.
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