Share your experience using NetFlow Auditor

My use case for WhatsUp Gold includes all device availability checks, bandwidth usage, CPU, and memory usage, as well as alarm notifications.

The best feature of WhatsUp Gold is the automatic generation of topology and its integration with virtualization and wireless.

I have used the automated device discovery with this topology feature.

The interactive map feature helps me manage the topology because sometimes we cannot draw the topology correctly, so we need to manually edit the connections.

The alerting system is very tunable and customizable, but it's a little complicated to use. Many customers cannot manage it by themselves and need support from us, the provider.

We always use the dashboards in the SOC, where we constantly display a dashboard or multiple dashboards. This allows us to know immediately if the connection or bandwidth is full or if the connection is broken.

It would be great if WhatsUp Gold could add features that simplify management with AI, as it is currently too complicated to manage.

I have been working with WhatsUp Gold for about 10 years.

WhatsUp Gold is a little unstable, as I experience problems about one or two times a year. It's not perfectly stable, but it is useful and acceptable in terms of availability.

It is easy to scale up WhatsUp Gold, but the problem we face is the size of the database, as the integration with MS SQL is not sufficient. Most customers opt for the free version, which has limitations.

I will ask the Taiwan local support, specifically 01 Technology, for any technical support regarding WhatsUp Gold.

Positive

Other products I use include WhatsUp Gold and I have experience with firewall products such as Palo Alto Networks or Fortinet.

Setting up WhatsUp Gold is complicated and not easy because it requires managing SNMP and many complex settings in the devices it's monitoring, and fine-tuning it to fit our needs is also not very easy.

The most familiar competing product for me is PRTG.

The product to manage is PRTG, and its features are almost the same compared to WhatsUp Gold.

For ease of use, PRTG is better, but for technical support and resources, WhatsUp Gold is superior in Taiwan.

I suggest using WhatsUp Gold if there is a need to monitor networks, but some customers stop using it because they find it too complicated or not good to use. I rate WhatsUp Gold a seven out of ten.

For SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer, I have worked on the entire SolarWinds Orion Platform. I have worked upon almost all the modules of SolarWinds and I have leveraged the NPM, NCM, SAM, NTA, different modules of SolarWinds to achieve business objectives. I find this tool really good in perspective of network device monitoring. I have integrated this tool in my previous organization with other tools for auto-ticketing.

I have been working with SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer for almost five to six years, both in my current organization and my previous organization. To be precise, they want to monitor the traffic to optimize the performance of the infrastructure. If in a particular LAN or in a particular location the traffic is more, then through the SolarWinds NTA module, they can further drill down to where the traffic is going. They can monitor any specific user on a specific site, such as Netflix, YouTube, or something similar, which can be drilled down to that level in SolarWinds.

Regarding applications, I haven't worked much on it, so I am not very aware of that part because mostly I have done traffic monitoring. For applications, we were using different tools for application monitoring, so I'm not very comfortable with that aspect.

The dashboards of the NTA module are very interactive and precise. It provides detailed information with drill-down facility. We can check issues from a subnet to a particular location, to a specific website. To that level, we can drill down in the dashboard.

The dashboard output is good, and we can create modern dashboards. We can leverage the SolarWinds Query Language (SWQL), which is an out-of-the-box SolarWinds language to create modern dashboards. The dashboard features I personally appreciate the most in the SolarWinds module.

Regarding alerting, it has many out-of-the-box alerts configured, such as device down, SNMP not responding, CPU or memory usage. These alerts can be customized as per requirements.

It has excellent alerting features and reporting capabilities. We can create reports based upon alerts or events. Many out-of-the-box reports are present in SolarWinds which we can leverage. For alerts, the dashboards are excellent, allowing us to segregate alerts based upon groups, location, or specific device type. These options are available within SolarWinds, and we can customize them as per requirements.

It provides proactive monitoring, rather than waiting for applications to go down due to heavy bandwidth or latency. We can identify issues ahead of time and resolve them before they become critical situations. This module is particularly helpful in identifying issues before they turn into significant problems.

Regarding improvement, the application monitoring capabilities are not exceptional. If SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer could improve in that area, it would be helpful.

It is less AIOps driven actually.

I have been using the solution for almost five to six years.

The solution is quite stable. I haven't encountered any monitoring issues. I would rate it somewhere around 8 to 9 for stability.

The customer service is good, and I would rate it around 8. Sometimes we encounter engineers who don't have sufficient knowledge, which delays issue resolution. However, most of the time the service is good.

Positive

Before SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer, we were using Spectrum, which was earlier managed by CA Technologies, but has been taken over by Broadcom. We call it Broadcom NetOps now, though earlier it was called CA Spectrum. We were using that tool for monitoring network devices and servers. That tool is very costly. Broadcom NetOps is costly, so we moved network monitoring from Broadcom NetOps to SolarWinds.

We did look into other solutions, but when we compared features and pricing, we found this tool ideal for our requirement and environment. Therefore, we chose SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer.

I have been working with different observability, AIOps tools, such as SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer, xMatters, Spectrum, and other tools.

NetFlow is a protocol which we use when a router is being monitored. We enable NetFlow, which is mostly done by the network teams. As a solution architect of the tool, we do the configuration required at the SolarWinds end, but at the device end, the network team enables this NetFlow protocol. Once they enable it, the traffic monitoring starts within the SolarWinds console.

Regarding integration, it's mostly the integration of the entire SolarWinds software with other tools. We integrated SolarWinds with ServiceNow for auto-ticketing. It provides out-of-the-box integration with many third-party tools such as ServiceNow, or event management tools such as xMatters from Everbridge or BigPanda. The integration is straightforward, which users can easily achieve.

We primarily monitor bandwidth, latency, and response time. These are the three metrics we monitor frequently.

My overall rating for SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer is 7 out of 10.