SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer Reviews

I assess the impact of the alerting and reporting capabilities of SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer by using email alerts and SMS alerts, which are very important as we get the instant report of any fault or any issue or any warning by using these SMS alerts and email alerts.

I track the performance and efficiency of our network by following our developed internal escalation matrix and report matrix based on our team strength and different roles of each technical resource.

I use the application recognition feature within SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer.

The application recognition feature of SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer has helped me identify and manage bandwidth-intensive applications by providing insight into the applications and their behavior regarding bandwidth consumption, so I can reverse engineer and advise my application development teams if there are any lightweight applications causing unnecessary traffic and using bandwidth that should not be consumed.

The integration of SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer with other SolarWinds tools such as Network Performance Monitor is very important for our network visibility, as integration is quite simple and smooth if you follow the standard process mentioned in the SolarWinds guidelines and knowledge base documentation.

We are using SolarWinds and have all the modules with us, including NetFlow and NPM. It is primarily used for Ampeller's Internet connectivity and device health monitoring. 

Additionally, we use it to generate monthly reports to present to management regarding bandwidth usage and clients. To justify the Bandwidth.

The bandwidth indicates the utilization of the devices; if any issue occurs, it triggers an alert for me.

I find this tool very helpful in identifying the top traffic paths from source to destination, and determining which routes are consuming the most resources. In this way, NetFlow provides more insights. For example, consider a scenario where I have a one-gig circuit connecting two locations.

This tool provides insights into top utilization applications or it identifies which circuit or application is consuming the most on the complete one-gig circuit traffic path. This feature makes net flows very visible to me and to customers, showing what is happening at the backend. This is the main feedback I receive from customers about how NetFlow is being managed.

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.

We use the network traffic analyzer for network bandwidth utilization and to understand where traffic is slow or unresponsive on the devices. It helps us understand how traffic is traversing the network.

It is also used in the manufacturing industry, but it's primarily for devices connected to the network, both in manufacturing and IT. It's not specific to any industry but rather used for the overall enterprise network.

NetFlow Traffic Analyzer has impacted our troubleshooting processes. It really helps most of the time and gives a lot of information. 

However, there's a bit of a challenge in terms of navigation, and there are some limitations in the current Orion product. The new features in Orion and the high observability might have new features. 

We use the solution for capacity planning.

Consider a business that moves into online trading, creating a hybrid environment where the network is partly controlled by a cloud provider and partly by the company. In such a scenario, I could reduce network consumption within the organization by moving some applications to the cloud. By simulating this change, I can analyze the impact on network traffic. If the simulation shows a significant reduction in traffic, it may be more cost-effective to move applications to the cloud rather than reengineer the entire network.

We use SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer primarily for monitoring our network traffic. We are exporting the flows from our network devices to SolarWinds, which then creates graphs showing the amount of traffic and the types of protocols in use, such as HTTP, TCP, and UDP.

SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer helps us identify issues when there is a link overload. It allows us to pinpoint which protocol is overloading the link.

We use SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer primarily to check and collect flow data from multiple devices, including Cisco, Juniper, and Huawei platforms. Our main focus is monitoring bandwidth usage across different devices and regions. Monitoring bandwidth application traffic is the primary concern.

The best feature is customizable reporting, which includes network diagrams and monitoring of various types of bandwidth usage and peak times. These reports are crucial for managing bandwidth usage and network management within our organization.