Get started with NTA

If you need to know how and by whom your bandwidth is being used, NTA provides a simple answer. You can quickly trace and monitor the bandwidth usage of a particular application or type of traffic. For example, if you see excessive bandwidth use on a particular interface, you can use NTA to see that the company meeting, consisting of streaming video, is consuming 80% of the available bandwidth through a particular switch. Unlike many other NetFlow analysis products, the network and flow data presented in NTA are not purely extrapolated data, but they are based on real information collected about the network by Network Performance Monitor, on which NTA depends.

Out of the box, NetFlow Traffic Analyzer offers broad monitoring and charting capabilities, coupled with detail-driven statistics, including the following:

• Distribution of bandwidth across traffic types
• Usage patterns over time
• External traffic identification and tracking
• Tight integration with detailed interface performance statistics

These monitoring capabilities, along with the customizable SolarWinds Platform Web Console and reporting engines, make NTA the easiest choice you will make involving your flow monitoring needs.

NTA is optimized for understanding network usage, not auditing every packet. NTA provides an overall traffic summary and how users are using your bandwidth.

To learn more about the NTA views you can use to monitor traffic flows, see View NTA data in the SolarWinds Platform Web Console.

If you understand NetFlow and CBQoS, you can Set up flow monitoring to begin monitoring flows in NTA.