Tips and tricks

• NTA is optimized for understanding network usage, not auditing every packet. It provides an overall traffic summary and how users are using your bandwidth. For more information, see Getting started.
• NTA supports many applications out of the box. However, if you have custom internal applications, assign a port name and number to them so that they are reported correctly, and not marked as unknown. For more information, see Applications and service ports in NTA.
• SolarWinds recommends creating IP Address Groups, for example by location, especially for the benefit of your first level support group, to quickly see IP Address ranges and makes things easier to manage. For more information, see IP address groups in NTA.
• You can use a filter to exclude applications that you are not interested in, for example, web traffic or SNMP traffic. For more information, see Application Filtered view and Search and filter tools.
• Limit reports by time and by the number of top X objects they should display. For more information, see Best practices for NTA reports.
• Network Sonar Discovery is a powerful tool which helps you find objects on your network and add them to the SolarWinds Platform Web Console for monitoring.
• You can dynamically change the width of columns in the SolarWinds Platform Web Console views and enlarge charts using zoom functions in your browser, such as Ctrl++ in Chrome.
• For more examples of how to use tools and widgets that NTA provides, see How to....