SolarWinds Orion NetFlow Traffic Analyzer v2.1

Orion NetFlow Traffic Analyzer provides a new level of visibility into network traffic behavior and trends. By leveraging Cisco's NetFlow protocol to extract data from routers, NetFlow Traffic Analyzer provides an in-depth view into which users and applications are consuming the most bandwidth.
NetFlow Traffic Analyzer converts that data into charts and tables providing network engineers with a easy way to identify and isolate the cause and source of network problems, as well as provide historical performance information to help plan for future growth. Pie charts show the distribution of bandwidth across different types of traffic (e.g., HTTP, FTP, VoIP) and across different users. Line charts show the usage patterns over time. NetFlow Traffic Analyzer can also identify the source of external traffic inbound to the corporate network.

NetFlow Traffic Analyzer solves every-day networking concerns for networking engineers such as:

* What applications are consuming network bandwidth?
* Which users are generating the most traffic?
* What IP addresses are my top talkers?
* Should I upgrade my WAN bandwidth? Why?
* What is the historical trend of bandwidth of my WAN and LAN links?
* When my network is running hot, what's going on?

Network engineers use NetFlow Traffic Analyzer to determine:

* Application and network usage – who, what, where, when
* The impact of changes to the network
* Network anomalies
* Security vulnerabilities

NetFlow Traffic Analyzer also:

* Optimizes network resource allocation
* Enables quick troubleshooting of network problems
* Profiles users' consumption patterns
* Profiles applications' consumption patterns
* Enables quick access to traffic data
* Scales to monitor interfaces with multi-gigabit throughput
* Enables long-term storage of NetFlow data
* Improves performance & availability


Orion NetFlow Traffic Analyzer Benefits & Features

Orion NetFlow Traffic Analyzer provides many robust benefits with supporting features, but the key differentiators when comparing this product to other offerings in the market include:

Top-to-Bottom Network Analysis

NetFlow Traffic Analyzer enables network engineers to quickly examine Cisco NetFlow traffic data and to drill down into the data to determine traffic by user, application, department, conversation, interface and protocol. The integration with Orion Network Performance Monitor provides users with the deepest drill-down across traffic patterns and into device performance, resulting in unprecedented visibility into usage, performance and availability statistics. Competitive offerings merely infer and estimate utilization data.

Optimized Storage Engine

NetFlow Traffic Analyzer includes a service that intelligently summarizes large amounts of raw NetFlow data, providing users quick access to historical data while minimizing storage costs. The raw data is replaced by the summary, allowing the customer to keep significant amounts of information ready for graphs and tables. In contrast, other products either limit what the users can keep, or they create large, hard-to-manage databases with expensive storage costs.

Enterprise-Ready Management Infrastructure

NetFlow Traffic Analyzer is built on the mature Orion Network Performance Manager platform, providing users with all of the enterprise scalability and stability benefits of Orion. In contrast, other products are relatively new standalone tools with little track record of standing up to the high volume of NetFlow data that will be generated by any but the smallest enterprise.
Reporting

Orion-style reports can be run and scheduled with Orion NetFlow Traffic Analyzer. Out-of-the-box reports include:

* Traffic by Top xx applications over y days
* Traffic by Top xx endpoints over y days
* Traffic by Top xx protocols over y days
* Traffic by Top xx domains over y days
* Traffic by IP address group over y days

Historical NetFlow Forensics

Analysis of network traffic is much easier by enabling insight into specific periods of time. This is extremely important when diagnosing "what happened?" during a given time period, enabling a forensic analysis of the NetFlow data.

Other key benefits with supporting features include:

Enable Analytical Capacity Planning

NetFlow Traffic Analyzer highlights trends in network traffic, allowing network staff to anticipate changes in bandwidth needs for different parts of the business and plan accordingly.
Optimize Network Resource Allocation

NetFlow Traffic Analyzer delivers the data necessary to identify areas of excess capacity and re-assign bandwidth to areas experiencing bottlenecks without necessarily increasing spending.

Align IT Resources with Business Needs

NetFlow Traffic Analyzer shows IT staff exactly what users are doing on the network, allowing them to adjust their efforts to fully support business priorities.

Increase Network Security

NetFlow Traffic Analyzer improves visibility into the inbound network traffic, exposing suspicious activities or anomalous patterns to identify a wide variety of intrusions, such as the SQL slammer worm, and malware that populate "fake" e-mail traffic in hopes of overloading Exchange servers.

System Requirements

Operating System: Windows 2003 Server (32-bit or 64-bit) including R2, with IIS installed
.NET Framework: Version 2.0 or later
Database Support: Microsoft SQL Server 2000 or 2005 on a separate database server with 4 to 8GB of memory and 20GB of hard drive space
CPU: 3 GHz or faster
RAM: 2 GB
Note: Version 2.1 requires Orion Network Performance Monitor v8.1