What would be the best method to monitor ALL web traffic/usage from an organization to/from specific external websites?

N.Al.Mal

The goal is to determine the bandwidth usage by music streaming across the network. Poking around in NTA but not entirely sure the best way to go about it. Thanks

taylor.crowley

Our best practice for this is finding a clean interface to use for exporting flow data. By 'Clean' I mean one which has the least amount of non-relevant traffic going through it to align with your use case. For example, if we are only interested in data going in and out to the internet, I would want the External WAN link on my router monitored rather than a switch uplink although this is still a possibility depending on the device flow capabilities

 

You should set up either Egress on the external and internal port of the router in the network OR, if supported, Ingress and Egress on just the external port.

From here if you are using Cisco devices you can configure them to utilise NBAR2 which is an application classification system that can analyze packets specifically for certain application data. In your instance, Spotify is listed as an NBAR2 application within the SolarWinds NTA flow navigator:

I've not done this before and I'm sure someone else can provide a more in depth explanation but if you configure NBAR2 data capture on an endpoint device you are exporting flow data from, you can capture this application data and monitor it through NTA in SolarWinds.

Here is some SolarWinds documentation explaining what NBAR2 is: https://documentation.solarwinds.com/en/success_center/nta/content/nta-applications-nbar2.htm

And here is documentation from SolarWinds on how to configure it on a Cisco device: https://documentation.solarwinds.com/en/success_center/nta/content/nta-set-up-nbar2-on-a-cisco-device.htm

I hope this points you in the right direction 

(and I hope I haven't butchered the explanation...)