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It takes the well-respected Network Performance Monitor (NPM) and augments it with the SolarWinds NTA (NetFlow Traffic Analyzer) to provide a far greater insight into bandwidth usage by application and user.

Bandwidth Analyzer Pack sits on a solid foundation, with the NPM core product delivering a raft of network monitoring, analysis and problem diagnostic tools. NTA snaps seamlessly into the NPM Orion web console and can analyse all key Flow data types such as Cisco NetFlow, Juniper J-Flow, IPFIX, sFlow and Huawei NetStream.

Starting with NPM, we found deployment on a Windows Server 2008 R2 system a swift process. Our first task was to run the Sonar Discovery tool and provide IP address ranges and subnets plus credentials for SNMP, VMware and Windows systems. NPM correctly identified all the devices on our lab network, which included Windows 7 and 8 workstations, 2008 R2 and 2012 servers, VMware hosts, switches, printers and routers. Sonar can be scheduled to run regularly and issue alerts when new devices are found or changes are detected.

NPM's intuitive LUCID (logical, useable, customisable, interactive and drill-down) web interface opens with a complete summary of all network activity and device status. It provides alerts so that you can quickly identify problems, and its various views can be easily customised to suit. NPM's dynamic mapping and status indicators are ideal for geographically distributed networks. Maps can be customised using the Atlas tool and its ConnectNow feature creates connection lines as you drag and drop device icons onto your map.

NTA functions as an extension of NPM and simply adds another tab to the main Orion web interface. To add Flow-enabled devices and interfaces to NTA they will need to have been previously discovered and added to the NPM database. Our Flow sources were already configured with the NTA server as a target so that their traffic was picked up automatically and the relevant interfaces added to the NTA console. The NTA tab opens with a summary page which alone provides a wealth of information about network activity. It lists all sources and events along with customisable graphs of the top applications, conversations and endpoints. We could quickly skip across the NTA tabs and see all endpoints along with the top receivers and transmitters.

The application graph quickly showed us how much bandwidth activities including web browsing, email, FTP, VoIP and media streaming activities were consuming. We could drill down into selected applications and see which endpoints were using the most bandwidth, how much was being consumed, and even the top source and destination countries.

As NTA snaps into the NPM Orion console it offers a lot of advantages over standalone Flow monitoring products. It uses NPM's core alerting facility allowing you to add NTA top talker information to interface utilisation alerts as well as alerting on issues with Cisco's CBQoS traffic management policies.

And then there's NPM's Report Writer, to which NTA adds an extra group of predefined NetFlow reports. A wide choice is provided and includes the top applications, conversations and endpoints over the past day. These can all be customised so that you can choose the number of entries you want to see, add more filters, and change the date range.

We've always been impressed with SolarWinds NPM as it's a sophisticated and affordable network monitoring and diagnostics solution. The Bandwidth Analyzer Pack extends these qualities with NTA integrating seamlessly with the main Orion console and providing highly detailed and well organised bandwidth and application usage analysis.

Product: Bandwidth Analyzer Pack
Supplier: SolarWinds
Tel: 0800 028 6782
Web site: www.solarwinds.com
Price: From £2,950 excluding VAT for 100 devices