Quick tour

NTA gives highly detailed insight into the quantity and the quality of traffic on your network. This chapter is most useful when read from start to finish. It begins with an overview of the widgets immediately available on the NTA Summary view, and it continues with summaries of the most often used NTA views. The sections of this chapter build on each other sequentially, to show you NTA key features.

Before we start the NTA quick tour, we must explain two terms: view and widget.

View

A view is a web page showing information about your network and the traffic going through individual nodes and interfaces. A view consists of widgets. You can customize which widgets you want to have on a view.

NTA provides two basic types of views:

Summary views

Display traffic details on all nodes and interfaces managed by NTA, such as top applications, conversations, and endpoints. You can access your summary views either in the My Dashboards > NetFlow views or by clicking an item in another view. For example, clicking on an application in the Top 5 Applications Summary view displays a summary view covering the use of the selected application in all nodes monitored in NTA.

Detail views

Display traffic information on individual objects in your network, such as interface details, node details, and application details. You can access your detail views by opening a summary view, and then clicking on the object whose details you want to see.

Widget

A widget is a building block of a view. A widget displays on a view as a box and provides information about different aspects of traffic monitoring, usually in a chart or table. Some widgets are meant to be used on summary views, some are suitable for detail views, and some can be useful on both view types. The information shown pertains to either:

• All devices NTA monitors, if used on a summary view.
• To the selected object, if used on a detail view for a node, interface, conversation, application, CBQoS class, or other object.