How NTA works

NTA collects Class Based Quality of Service (CBQoS) and flow data, processes it, and together with performance data collected by SolarWinds NPM, presents the data in graphs and reports to show bandwidth use on your network. These reports help you:

• Monitor interface-level network bandwidth usage, and identify users, applications, protocols, and IP address groups that consume most bandwidth.
• Track conversations between internal and external endpoints.
• Analyze traffic patterns, with up to one-minute granularity, over months, days, or minutes by drilling down into any network element.
• Enhance bandwidth capacity before outages occur.

Flow monitoring architecture

The SolarWinds Platform is used to power SolarWinds products, including SolarWinds NTA. It provides centralized administration, access control, and alerting and reporting. The SolarWinds Platform Web Console is the web interface used for navigating through the NetFlow Summary page, managing SolarWinds NTA settings, or common SolarWinds Platform features like alerts and reports. The following diagram shows how data travels from flow-enabled network devices to the SolarWinds NTA collector, which collects the data and inserts it into the SolarWinds NTA Flow Storage database.

CBQoS monitoring architecture

CBQoS implementations work much the same way as flow-enabled implementations, except that the NetFlow collector polls each device and the device returns data that meets the CBQoS policies you have defined. The system keeps collected data in the SolarWinds Platform database. The SolarWinds Platform Web Console is then used to navigate through the dashboard, manage the product settings, or the common features of the SolarWinds Platform products, such as alerts and reports. For more information about CBQoS implementations, see View CBQoS data in the NTA Administrator Guide.