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NetFlow Traffic Analyzer
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NetFlow Traffic Analyzer

NetFlow Analyzer

Monitor Cisco NetFlow and bandwidth usage with a NetFlow analyzer tool

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Fully functional for 30 days
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Analyze NetFlow
Track Bandwidth
Correlate Traffic Data
Generate Reports

Perform thorough Cisco NetFlow analysis and monitoring in real-time



Network bandwidth management is a vital activity for every network engineer, and SolarWinds® NetFlow Traffic Analyzer (NTA) enables the powerful insights you need with its NetFlow feature for Cisco and more. Use NetFlow analysis for everything through to the interface level, giving you the ability to identify the users, applications, and protocols consuming the most bandwidth. Get insights into traffic patterns over time and with up to one-minute granularity.

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Fully functional for 30 days
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Use Cisco NetFlow monitoring to track bandwidth use by user, application, and protocol

Bandwidth Management & Bandwidth Control Software with Hybrid Cloud Observability Use case type 1 1 Features Array Item - features item image


NTA’s NetFlow analysis functionalities allows network admins to monitor and capture the range of flow data types—including Cisco NetFlow, Juniper J-Flow, sFlow, Huawei NetStream, and IP FIX—built into most routers and switches. Cisco flow monitors convert data into easy-to-interpret charts and tables to quantify exactly how the network is being used. Identifying the users, applications, or protocols consuming the most bandwidth is key to delivering quality service.

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Fully functional for 30 days
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Correlate data across network events for better network traffic analysis

Bandwidth Management & Bandwidth Control Software with Hybrid Cloud Observability Use case type 1 2 Features Array Item - features item image


Once flow data is collected, NTA’s powerful NetFlow analyzer feature can provide critical insights helping you to identify network top talkers and bandwidth consumers. You can view updated charts and tables for quick insights into potential problem applications. But NTA also allows you to drag and drop cross-stack performance metrics on a shared timeline for easy visual identification of anomalous events and irregular activity, both in the moment and during past intervals. 

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Fully functional for 30 days
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Run and customize network traffic reporting in a few clicks

Bandwidth Management & Bandwidth Control Software with Hybrid Cloud Observability Use case type 1 0 Features Array Item - features item image


NTA automatically stores flow data in the NTA Flow Storage database, while Class Based Quality of Service (CBQoS) data is stored in the SolarWinds Orion® database. Both databases accumulate NetFlow analysis data for your use—from archival information to up-to-the-minute granularity. NTA offers predefined reports, customizable reports, and NetFlow-specific reports—ensuring you’re just clicks away from being able to create, schedule, and deliver detailed reports on network traffic and bandwidth. 

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Fully functional for 30 days
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Get More on NetFlow Analyzer

Do you find yourself asking…

  • What is NetFlow analysis?
  • Why is NetFlow analysis important?
  • What does a NetFlow analyzer do?
  • How does the NetFlow analyzer work in NTA?

NetFlow analysis is the process of collecting and monitoring network traffic to perform in-depth inspection and interpretation of traffic flow information, which can help you build a broad, overall picture of traffic flow and reveal useful insights regarding traffic source and destination, causes of congestion, and classes of service.

NetFlow analysis is also an integral part of deciding how and where to best apply Quality of Service (QoS) policies. It plays an important role in network security, as it can be used to detect Distributed Denial of Service (or DDoS) attacks, unauthorized activity, and improper network events that could be signs of a cyberattack. 

NetFlow analysis and monitoring is an efficient way to collect and retain data related to network applications, communication traffic, endpoints, and users.

With any network, it can become expensive and inefficient to manually analyze packet capture (or pcap) data. By collecting and organizing data packets according to IP address, protocol, and transport port—creating compact record files, performing NetFlow analysis can help you more easily focus and simplify your network and security monitoring efforts.

Analyzing flow data records can also help inform many different purposes, including accounting and network forensics. Users can leverage flow data records to help identify data exfiltration, DDoS attacks, misconfigured network devices, and network scans originating from external sources.

Cisco NetFlow analyzers are designed to offer more functionality than simple packet and byte aggregation solutions, which includes providing greater insights into traffic and supporting faster troubleshooting with comprehensive data correlation features.

Manually performing traffic analysis across different data types can be a time-consuming process typically requiring multiple tools to gain different metrics, normalize this data, and create a consolidate view.

There are three primary components to a Cisco NetFlow analyzer monitoring system. These include a flow exporter, a flow collector, and an analysis application. A flow exporter is responsible for aggregating data packets into flows and exporting records of those flows towards flow collectors. Flow collectors are responsible for receiving, storing, and preparing flow data from flow exporters for processing. Analysis applications are responsible for analyzing the flow data received from flow collectors for signs of intrusion or malicious traffic profiles.

Using a NetFlow analyzer to understand traffic flow data can help you better determine causes of bottlenecks and overall traffic volume, both of which play an important role in capacity planning and ensuring resources are adequately provisioned and properly allocated as an organization scales.

SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer is designed to allows users to monitor network bandwidth and traffic patterns in real time and over time. NTA not only collects flow NetFlow v5 and v9 data from Cisco routers and switches but can also collect and analyze data generated by Huawei NetStream, IPFIX, Juniper J-Flow, and sFlow. NTA’s NetFlow analyzer can also help you locate the root causes of high bandwidth usage and convert flow data into tables and charts to categorize and quantify who is using the network, how much they’re using it, and for what purpose.

NTA helps make network monitoring easier and accessible by centralizing a comprehensive view of multiple data streams and traffic metrics into a single user dashboard. The application’s intuitive interface allows you to drill down on network traffic data with a few clicks—which can help provide in-depth network forensics analytics on the traffic moving through network elements and enabling users to isolate unexpected traffic or excessive bandwidth usage.

NTA is built to grant critical visibility into bandwidth utilization and offers a powerful alerting system to keep admins up to date on overall network usage. NTA can instantly send alerts when interfaces exceed utilization thresholds and will also provide information on top talkers, so you can catch the applications using the most bandwidth.

You can use NTA’s Flow Navigator filters to quickly sort network traffic for customizable views on traffic data, so you can more easily locate the source of bandwidth usage based on application, IP address, or protocol and identify whether network slowdowns are related to business use or personal usage.

SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer is built to be used with SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor (NPM) to allow flow data to be quickly compared against other network performance metrics for easier data correlation. For even deeper visibility, NPM can be included in the Orion Platform, which is a common technology platform supporting several SolarWinds products to provide a centralized view and experience for monitoring and managing your network, storage, systems, and virtualization environments all from a single dashboard. You can try both products free for 30 days by downloading Network Bandwidth Analyzer Pack.

 

  • NetFlow analysis is the process of collecting and monitoring network traffic to perform in-depth inspection and interpretation of traffic flow information, which can help you build a broad, overall picture of traffic flow and reveal useful insights regarding traffic source and destination, causes of congestion, and classes of service.

    NetFlow analysis is also an integral part of deciding how and where to best apply Quality of Service (QoS) policies. It plays an important role in network security, as it can be used to detect Distributed Denial of Service (or DDoS) attacks, unauthorized activity, and improper network events that could be signs of a cyberattack. 

  • NetFlow analysis and monitoring is an efficient way to collect and retain data related to network applications, communication traffic, endpoints, and users.

    With any network, it can become expensive and inefficient to manually analyze packet capture (or pcap) data. By collecting and organizing data packets according to IP address, protocol, and transport port—creating compact record files, performing NetFlow analysis can help you more easily focus and simplify your network and security monitoring efforts.

    Analyzing flow data records can also help inform many different purposes, including accounting and network forensics. Users can leverage flow data records to help identify data exfiltration, DDoS attacks, misconfigured network devices, and network scans originating from external sources.

  • Cisco NetFlow analyzers are designed to offer more functionality than simple packet and byte aggregation solutions, which includes providing greater insights into traffic and supporting faster troubleshooting with comprehensive data correlation features.

    Manually performing traffic analysis across different data types can be a time-consuming process typically requiring multiple tools to gain different metrics, normalize this data, and create a consolidate view.

    There are three primary components to a Cisco NetFlow analyzer monitoring system. These include a flow exporter, a flow collector, and an analysis application. A flow exporter is responsible for aggregating data packets into flows and exporting records of those flows towards flow collectors. Flow collectors are responsible for receiving, storing, and preparing flow data from flow exporters for processing. Analysis applications are responsible for analyzing the flow data received from flow collectors for signs of intrusion or malicious traffic profiles.

    Using a NetFlow analyzer to understand traffic flow data can help you better determine causes of bottlenecks and overall traffic volume, both of which play an important role in capacity planning and ensuring resources are adequately provisioned and properly allocated as an organization scales.

  • SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer is designed to allows users to monitor network bandwidth and traffic patterns in real time and over time. NTA not only collects flow NetFlow v5 and v9 data from Cisco routers and switches but can also collect and analyze data generated by Huawei NetStream, IPFIX, Juniper J-Flow, and sFlow. NTA’s NetFlow analyzer can also help you locate the root causes of high bandwidth usage and convert flow data into tables and charts to categorize and quantify who is using the network, how much they’re using it, and for what purpose.

    NTA helps make network monitoring easier and accessible by centralizing a comprehensive view of multiple data streams and traffic metrics into a single user dashboard. The application’s intuitive interface allows you to drill down on network traffic data with a few clicks—which can help provide in-depth network forensics analytics on the traffic moving through network elements and enabling users to isolate unexpected traffic or excessive bandwidth usage.

    NTA is built to grant critical visibility into bandwidth utilization and offers a powerful alerting system to keep admins up to date on overall network usage. NTA can instantly send alerts when interfaces exceed utilization thresholds and will also provide information on top talkers, so you can catch the applications using the most bandwidth.

    You can use NTA’s Flow Navigator filters to quickly sort network traffic for customizable views on traffic data, so you can more easily locate the source of bandwidth usage based on application, IP address, or protocol and identify whether network slowdowns are related to business use or personal usage.

    SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer is built to be used with SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor (NPM) to allow flow data to be quickly compared against other network performance metrics for easier data correlation. For even deeper visibility, NPM can be included in the Orion Platform, which is a common technology platform supporting several SolarWinds products to provide a centralized view and experience for monitoring and managing your network, storage, systems, and virtualization environments all from a single dashboard. You can try both products free for 30 days by downloading Network Bandwidth Analyzer Pack.

     

“Netflow is one of the most useful tools in my arsenal because it’s not subject to the logging verbosity that any individual operating system or application might implement. [...] I use NTA all the time to investigate suspicious activity and suspect hosts.”
@rcframe - THWACK Community
Security Analyst
Agriculture, Forestry, and Manufacturing

Gain key insights by using NetFlow analyzer tools

NetFlow Traffic Analyzer

  • Perform NetFlow analysis for insights into applications, protocols, and IP address groups.
  • Get alerted if application traffic suddenly increases, decreases, or disappears completely.
  • With NetFlow analysis, you can get insight over months, days, or minutes by drilling down into any network element.
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Fully functional for 30 days
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