Introduction to NTA

Discover NetFlow Traffic Analyzer (NTA), designed to collect, analyze, and report on network traffic.

Download the PDF: NTA Product Guide (formerly known as Administrator Guide)

What you monitor

NTA provides visibility into how network traffic moves through your environment. NTA collects flow data from supported network devices and interfaces and lets you analyze traffic by sources, destinations, applications, protocols, sites, and flow direction.

Use NTA to monitor:

• Network traffic and bandwidth utilization

• Applications and service ports

• Endpoints and IP address groups

• Flow sources and interfaces

• Traffic flow direction

• CBQoS policies and data

• NBAR2 applications

• Autonomous system networks through BGP

Get started with NTA

Set up NTA to collect and analyze network traffic from supported flow sources. Review the requirements, configure your network devices to export flow data, and add the flow sources to the SolarWinds Platform.

NTA can collect and analyze flow data from technologies such as NetFlow, IPFIX, sFlow, J-Flow, and Huawei NetStream. Depending on your environment and device support, you can also use NBAR2 data to identify applications and monitor application traffic, CBQoS data to evaluate class-based quality of service policies, and BGP data to analyze traffic between autonomous systems.

For more information, see Get started with NTA.

Configure NTA for your environment

Configure NTA to control how flow data is collected, processed, stored, and displayed. You can configure flow management, applications and service ports, IP address groups, monitored protocols, flow sources, CBQoS devices, collector services, DNS resolution, database settings, and charting options.

You can also optimize NTA for your environment by controlling data retention, flow collection, DNS resolution, top talker processing, and other settings that affect performance and the amount of data NTA processes.

For more information, see Configure NTA.

Analyze NTA data in the SolarWinds Platform Web Console

View and analyze the network traffic data collected by NTA in the SolarWinds Platform Web Console. Use NTA resources, charts, and Flow Navigator to investigate traffic patterns, identify sources and destinations, and focus on the traffic that matters to you.

You can customize Web Console views, filter traffic by different dimensions, examine traffic associated with specific endpoints, and view specialized data such as NBAR2 applications and CBQoS information.

For more information, see View NTA data in the SolarWinds Platform Web Console.

Investigate common network traffic scenarios

Use NTA to investigate network traffic and identify issues that affect bandwidth usage, applications, and network performance. Common scenarios include finding the cause of high bandwidth utilization, tracking traffic by site, monitoring autonomous system networks, working with CBQoS data, and investigating potentially unwanted or malicious traffic.

Use the scenario-based guidance to apply NTA data to common network monitoring and troubleshooting tasks, from identifying traffic sources to investigating suspicious activity.

For more information, see Common tasks and user scenarios.

Analyze traffic with NTA reports

Use NTA reports to analyze historical traffic data and investigate traffic patterns over time. NTA provides predefined reports for NetFlow and CBQoS data, as well as options for creating and customizing reports for specific monitoring requirements.

You can use reports to examine historical traffic, analyze flows per second, focus on specific IP address groups or traffic characteristics, and create Web-based reports for the data that matters to your environment.

For more information, see Reports in NTA.

Monitor traffic conditions with NTA alerts

Use NTA alerts to monitor traffic conditions and identify issues that require attention. NTA provides predefined alerts and lets you configure advanced and flow-specific alerts based on the traffic conditions you want to monitor.

Alerts can help you identify changes in application traffic, top talkers, flow collection, and other traffic conditions without having to continuously inspect the Web Console.

For more information, see Alerts in NTA.

Troubleshoot with NTA

Use the NTA troubleshooting topics to diagnose issues with flow collection, processing, visualization, and traffic data. Troubleshooting guidance covers collector services, missing templates, inaccessible NetFlow services, unknown traffic, chart issues, duplicate flows, and CBQoS issues.

Use these topics when NTA is not receiving or processing flow data as expected, when traffic appears incorrectly in charts, or when you need to identify the cause of a flow-related problem.

For more information, see Troubleshoot with NTA.

Configure your network devices for NTA

Configure network devices to export flow data to NTA using the device-specific configuration examples. Examples cover NetFlow, Flexible NetFlow, sFlow, J-Flow, Cisco Catalyst switches, and Cisco ASA devices.

Use the examples as a reference when configuring supported devices to export flow data to your SolarWinds Platform environment. The available examples cover a range of Cisco, Brocade, Extreme, HP, and Juniper Networks devices.

For more information, see Device configuration examples for NTA.