Does solarwinds NPM collect data in flow based mode or is that something solarwinds nta does?

kbknetwork

So we are trying to monitor link utilization and  NPM does that by showing percentage utilization along with highest and average Mbps for links.

1. My question is I found out in some forum that there are 2 ways to monitor, one is interface polling via snmp and other is flow based.
2. Is NPM flow based since I found out that flow based give you accurate data where it shows short peaks of 1Gbps over 5 seconds whereas if it is snmp via interface monitor then it will show something like 80Mbps over 5 minutes.
3. I want to see short peaks as well and does snmp show that and I am unnecessarily worried or do we need to purchase solarwinds NTA as well?

Thank you

maciej.sandecki

NPM does not process flow data (Netflow), NTA is the module for this.

Netflow can show more details, but it may depend on the setup on the device (how the flow information is exported).

With SNMP, you could see peaks if you decreased interface polling interval from default (9 minutes) to something smaller or if you used real-time polling in Performance Analysis. Mind this may generate large amounts of data, especially if monitored over long time.