SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer Reviews

I mainly use NetFlow Traffic Analyzer to analyse traffic, for example, during meetings. I also use it to block high-authorization end-users to ensure the meeting goes smoothly.

I've been using NetFlow Traffic Analyzer for a year and a half.

I would rate NetFlow Traffic Analyzer's stability ten out of ten.

NetFlow Traffic Analyzer is scalable.

SolarWinds' technical support is ok, but it could be faster and more knowledgeable.

Neutral

The initial setup was easy, and deployment took one to two months. 

NetFlow Traffic Analyzer is reasonably priced.

I would give NetFlow Traffic Analyzer a rating of eight out of ten.

We use this solution for everyday network monitoring. This includes the flow analytics, and seeing what's online and what's not online. It is a key part of everyday operations.

Visibility in the network is huge. Using the NetFlow analyzer, along with their NPM and NCM modules, are key for keeping our network up to date and for visibility.

This solution is a huge time saver. Without it, you're making and you're analyzing flow patterns and making changes on a switch by switch, or router by router basis. This gives you that single pane of glass where you can really manage all of that, and push out to all of your devices no matter what the size of your environment is.

The NCM module is by far the most useful feature, as I am able to provision and employ changes to our entire infrastructure with a single tool. 

I like that it is able to monitor multiple devices and it's vendor-agnostic.

This solution would benefit from having more security-based communications between the actual devices and the software itself. After dealing with a bunch of other vendors who are very security-focused, it would be nice to see that included in other products as well. It may be a case where they have not kept up with certain security aspects as technology has changed.

I would like to see visual maps for all of the devices that are interconnected. They do have a feature that exists now, but I think that it can be worked on. There are some competitors out there that are doing a better job at that.

The solution is stable.

This solution is limitless and scales very well. You can use these tools for a single branch network or your entire enterprise and there is no difference in the deployment. 

There was no solution in place before this one. The network really scaled up quickly, and it had not been necessary before adding more branch properties led to more problems. 

The original deployment was completed before I started to work with the system, so I am not sure who deployed it. As we scale, it is us, the engineers, who do it all ourselves. I feel that it speaks to the product because we don't actually need professional services, as it's pretty easy to do it yourself.

This solution makes us more effective, allowing us to save time.

For our environment, we pay approximately $25,000 USD yearly. It is a lot cheaper than a lot of the other vendors.

I know that we evaluated NetBrain. Although they do not necessarily claim to be a network monitoring tool, a lot of the features offered by SolarWinds are also available. My understanding is that the price point was an issue.

My advice to anybody who is researching this type of solution is to know your environment. Regardless of the vendor you choose, know the costs associated with all of your endpoints.

I love using the tools provided in this solution. There is always room for improvement, but ultimately, I have always been happy with this product.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

We have a collection of SolarWinds solutions.

Our primary use for this tool is to monitor our network. We have a LAN and WAN to monitor. We use the product to get an overview of the performance to let us predict potential issues and act preemptively before we have real problems. The product helps us monitor the load on the network and on the different network lines. 

We are planning to expand our use because they offer some good advantages with broader product use. It is used on a daily basis and it is one of the key tools that we use to maintain our network and keep track of our infrastructure.

We are using an on-premises deployment.

We have faced some problems with our Oracle connection line in the past. For example, once we had a remote crash that affected the connection of more than two hundred users. So we've faced this kind of delay on our network. So, when this happens, we would go first to check the load on the connection line (we have a fibre connection) and we would check the traffic speed and the volume of data on the line. With Netflow Traffic Analyzer, it was very helpful to find out when the line was getting more congested.

Recently, there was some problem with one of the applications that we upgraded to. We could see the problem and we took all the necessary action to get things back into normal before the issue had a chance to get worse. SolarWinds helps us to monitor potential issues so we and our users do not experience downtime.

It's a fantastic product overall, so it is difficult to define one feature being the best.

It is fantastic to know the Traffic Analyzer can show us where the potential problems are. You become very familiar with the bandwidth being consumed by different lines and how all the traffic is moving between different departments and different applications.

At times, we faced a lot of issues with users on the internet because of the consumption of the bandwidth. It was very hard to try to find exactly what was going on and what applications affected traffic. With SolarWinds, we are now able to accurately gauge bandwidth consumption.

One of the things that can be improved is the licensing, as it is limited to a number of nodes. They limit it to five hundred nodes before jumping to the next level. When we exceeded that limit, we had to go directly to two thousand nodes. We did not really need that many but I still had to pay for that. The licensing should be more realistic so that we can adjust the number of nodes according to my needs, rather than in fixed increments. For example, one thousand nodes would have been enough. Jumping to four times the volume was too much.

We recently upgraded to a more recent version of this solution and we had an issue with backing up the data. We were unable to make proper use of the databases from the previous version.

This is a stable solution and we are happy with the product.

This is a scalable solution, but it is related to the licensing.

I have not personally contacted technical support for this solution. The feedback that I have received from my team is that the support is good.

We did not use another solution prior to this one.

The feedback I got from the person who performed the initial setup is good. He's happy with the product and is continuing to do the upgrades as we need them.

My understanding is that the deployment took less than two hours.

Our own technical team handled the implementation, and we did not need any help from anybody outside of the company.

We have three people who are taking care of our network. There is the network manager and his two staff.

The licensing for this solution is based on the number of nodes.

There were members of our team who had experience with other solutions, but we adopted this one after installing and using the evaluation version.

We are planning on upgrading to the SL2000 model.

As of today, I am satisfied with this solution.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

We use this tool for network supervision, and our environment includes Fortigate firewalls and Cisco switches.

This solution gives us important information about the utilization of protocols, particularly in terms of how often they are used.

The most valuable functions are the ability to show the Network Flow and the system of escalation.

I had a problem during the installation of this solution, and I was not able to find a solution in their forum. I would like to have a more efficient and more complete forum for support. I was eventually able to find the solution on another site.

I would like to see more training videos and additional material for learning how to use this solution.

Better integration and communication with third-party tools, including other NPMs such as Nagios, is needed.

This is a very stable solution.

In terms of support, I would rate them five or six out of ten. It was difficult to find videos for training. Overall, I am not satisfied with the support.

I have experience with Cisco tools, as well as Microsoft.

I have used many tools and this one is very interesting, but they need to provide better support and better training material.

I would rate this solution an eight and a half out of ten.

I use the solution to monitor the traffic between internal and external network endpoints.

The solution's most valuable feature is the network monitoring system. As it offers enterprise solutions, it has all the essential features for business. 

The solution's configuration had some issues in the beginning. They should work on the configuration of the Log Analyzer feature.

I have been using the solution for a year and a half.

It is a stable solution.

I rate the solution's scalability as a seven out of ten. I have almost 300 endpoint users of the solution. Also, considering the virtual machines I monitor, I have around 600 endpoint users of the solution.

SolarWinds is easier to use and has more features than ManageEngine.

The solution's initial setup was simple.

The solution's licensing is high-priced. I rate it as a four.

They update the security patches of the solution every month. I recommend the solution to others and rate it as a six.

We use many SolarWinds solutions. We use SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer mostly for monitoring the traffic and ensuring that everything is working well. We use it to manage and monitor the traffic and check if the connection between the two sites is well.

For managing the traffic, it provides you a response about whether the traffic is down, up, or heavy, which is a very powerful feature. It has a good response time. 

We have been using this solution for many years, and we don't have any problem with this solution. 

If your network is on SolarWinds, and you notice that the traffic is bad because it says "user downloading a heavy file," it doesn't indicate which endpoint is downloading those heavy files. SolarWinds doesn't have the tools to be able to handle this kind of situation. You can just notice through your network device that the traffic is becoming overwhelming or heavy, but you cannot go inside and get more details related to the endpoint where it is happening. We would like SolarWinds to be able to handle this kind of situation and even manage the traffic inside a network from the endpoint to the network device. These would be good enhancements.

It is mostly stable. The problem comes only when we want to add another SolarWinds model. SolarWinds has so many models, and sometimes when we want to add other models on the platforms that are reserved for our firm, it freezes. When this happens, we have to create a new VM for that model.

I have been using this solution for around seven years.

It is mostly stable, but there are issues with stability when you want to add another SolarWinds model to the platform.

It is good for small and medium enterprises. We have ten users who use this solution in our organization. This solution is mostly used by network administrators, and currently, they don't have another project to increase the usage of the solution.

Their technical support is good.

The initial setup isn't complex.

We have an internal team that manages this solution. 

We pay yearly, and we are happy with its price.

I would recommend this solution if your need is really about monitoring the traffic. It gives good feedback for monitoring the traffic, and it is a good solution for that, but if you want to do more than that, I would not recommend this solution.

It is a good solution for small and medium enterprises. It is good for enterprises that are not too big and don't have too many networks. 

I would rate SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer a six out of ten.

SolarWinds, in general, is used for inventory and monitoring. We use the Network Traffic Analyzer module mostly for support and debugging of issues and such.

They have instructional videos and other information available on the site to assist you with learning it. Even if you don't have an integrator or somebody teaching you how to use it, you could probably pick it up pretty easily.

I would like to see better customization capabilities.

We have been using the Netflow Traffic Analyzer for about five years.

The stability is good.

Scalability-wise, NetFlow Traffic Analyzer is fine.

The support is always good. They are good people and they answer questions quickly. They know their product.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward.

We contracted an integrator to assist us with the initial implementation and deployment.

Now, we're getting ready to redeploy an entirely new suite and we're doing that internally. We are able to do this now because we have a new person on staff who has experience with this type of thing.

This is a good product and I recommend it. 

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

Our primary use case is for analyzing traffic and monitoring performance.

The network performance monitor I have embedded has been able to give me a customized dashboard. The dashboard alerts me when a critical device would go off in the network. I get an SMS alarm. 

One improvement could be the system intelligence. I think another would be to show a kind of session mark that shows you the latency between each hub, but with much more intelligence. I know they do that but to make something that works very well I would want to see more terminals so that I can look where the need is happening. Of course, the network could be much better. 

I need to see something with AI. I know they don't have it, and I need to see straight through to integration and cloud monitoring. The application for monitoring should be enhanced with a better quality experience, in terms with what their customers are going through. Instead of looking at Bit-Coin sites they need to have insights like translating. 

In terms of scalability, so long as you have the licenses the solution is scalable. You can add and add on the devices. 

Customer support is quite complex.

The setup was complex. The part that is complex is that you have to mark the devices, you have to time the parameters, you have to monitor, and you have to set them up. It wasn't a straightforward thing. I'm not sure if there is a simple tool you can use to monitor or not. 
These tools are a bit complex, they need monitoring. Implementation took about five days.

The setup was done by consultants to make sure everything was consistent.

I think the price is fair. I haven't quite done price-to-price on a comparable product but I do think the price is fair. I'm looking at AI too. Artificial Intelligence that will monitor the cloud.

I would give the solution a 5 out of 10, there are opportunities to improve.