New to NTA - Question about remote collectors

neovolt

My question is this: What are the best practices for setting up remote collectors in an extended network environnment?

-We have ~30 sites connected via a wide area Microwave network with link bandwidth ranging from 10 Mbps to 300 Mbps. At most of the remote sites we have a VM Host.

More specific questions:

1. If I want to use NetFlow (sFlow in our case) on a switch at my remote sites, do I need a local collector at each site that I want to do this?

2. What kind of device would I need for a remote collector? What is the overhead/requirements for a remote collector? Could I just spin up a little VM on an existing Host?

3. How much traffic will a remote collector generate from my remote site back to my Core site?

4. Am I even asking the right questions?

Thanks for the help,

NTA Noob

sean.martinez

1. You can configure the devices to send NetFlow back to the Main Solarwinds Server, or you can purchase Additional Pollers to collect and report the information back to SQL.

          You can deploy 1 Additional Poller per location, or deploy an Additional Poller to cover multiple sites. Each Polling Server can handle about 50,000 Flows per second.

2. Solarwinds Additional Poller, same hardware requirements as the main Solarwinds server.

3. The amount of traffic is relative to the amount of NetFlow packets coming in, and the NPM Polling Collection. Once you have an idea about the number of incoming packets per second, you can use any NetFlow Calculator to determine the bandwidth overhead across the link without the Additonal Poller.