NetFlow Traffic Analyzer Overview

I'm certain you have heard this complaint many times as an IT professional.  But, there are so many potential causes of a slow network that sometimes it is difficult to isolate exactly what the root cause is.  One such way is to use a tool to monitor network bandwidth usage by taking advantage of the flow monitoring capability that is built into your routers. SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer, or NTA, captures and analyzes NetFlow, J-Flow, sFlow, IPFIX or NetStream data to tell you who, what, and how your network   traffic is being used.

NTA's summary page provides an easy-to-view dashboard of your network traffic. Here you will get a list of all of the flow-enabled sources you are monitoring. You can hover over the node to get more detail, or expand to see the specific interface that is being monitored. You will also get a summary view of traffic consumption by endpoint, applications, conversations or countries.

NTA's Flow Navigator gives you the ability at any point to filter your views for more granular insight into network traffic consumption. Let's go back to our complaint about a slow network. Here, we may want to start by looking at the Top 10 NetFlow Sources % Utilization chart to see if anything jumps out at us. Again, by hovering over the object,  you can obtain additional node details.

You can drill down into a node simply by clicking on it. Here we see the details of node.  You can quickly set the time period you would like to view, as well as the flow direction. Similar to the Summary page,  the Node Details page will show us traffic usage by application,  endpoint, transmitter, conversation, protocol, domain and receiver.

In this example, we see that 55% of our traffic through this interface is web traffic,  and that 54% of that web traffic is going to YouTube. NTA's drag-and-discover interactive charting allows you to select a more granular time period simply by clicking within the graph and dragging over the times of interest. You can also add or remove data sources from the graph with one-click. Now that we know that YouTube is consuming the majority of the traffic on this link, we can drill down again to see details about the traffic to and from this endpoint.

Here we see details on the YouTube.Com endpoint.  In this view, you can look at the Top 5 conversations with YouTube and see just who is driving the traffic. Instead of looking at interface details, you may want to start with the Conversations Summary. This view will show you the Top 10 conversations and what interface the conversation is going through.

You can also view summaries by country, endpoint,  receivers, transmitters, IP groups, protocols, and type of service. For those of you with multiple service providers that have implemented Border Gateway Protocol, NTA provides dedicated summary view so you can see just how your traffic is being routed across those service providers. NTA can be easily customized to your environment by selecting the applications and ports that you want to monitor, managing autonomous systems and IP address groups,  choosing the types of protocols to monitor, and manually managing NetFlow sources and CBQoS polling. You can further customize your alert settings,  top talker optimization, CBQos Polling, Database settings, and charting and graphing as well.

As with all SolarWinds products, you can download a free fully functional  30-day trial of SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer at www.Solarwinds.Com. And see just how easy it is to monitor and analyze network traffic in your environment..