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NTA - DNS and NetBIOS settings for an MSP

Hi Guys,

We are a Managed Service Provider with 150+ customers and ~12000 devices monitored via our Orion platform (2017.1.3 SP3, NTA 4.2.2). As our customers all have their own networks that clash we apply NAT'ing to their IP's in order to manage them.

This in turn means that DNS or NetBIOS lookup will not work for any of the customer devices, so netflow resources will always just show the IP addresses.

Within the Netflow Settings page there is the DNS and NetBIOS Resolution section and we currently have 'Enable NetBIOS resolution of endpoints' enabled and 'DNS Resolution' set to On Demand. The rest of the settings are at the default values and it also states that we have 41million expired IP addresses.

My question is should we disable both the DNS and NetBIOS settings as they will never work? Or is there a reason to keep them the way they are.

Our Netflow resources are taking an absolute age to load and tie up the users session until they have finished loading. Because we currently have DNS set to "on Demand" it tries to resolve the IPs when the page is loaded – so is this what is potentially causing the delay.

Anyone any advice for me?

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Accepted answers

tonyreel

So we disabled both the DNS and NetBIOS options and my word what an improvement. The summary page load times went from >60 to <10 and all the other netflow related resources also had a massive boost.

Can't believe we lived with that pain for so long.

As I said in the original post because of our NATing the lookups would only work for internal kit and that was not needed - the speed increase was well worth it.

All comments

tonyreel

One other area that came up when reading the various help docs on improving NTA performance was re-indexing the Netflow tables in Orion.

Re-index NetFlow tables in the Orion database - SolarWinds Worldwide, LLC. Help and Support

Has anyone done this and noticed an improvement - is there a way of checking it needs done?

Thanks guys.

Tony

mesverrum

Even in simple environments having the DNS on demand really hurts the load times, I'd definitely suggest changing that setting.

tonyreel

So we disabled both the DNS and NetBIOS options and my word what an improvement. The summary page load times went from >60 to <10 and all the other netflow related resources also had a massive boost.

Can't believe we lived with that pain for so long.

As I said in the original post because of our NATing the lookups would only work for internal kit and that was not needed - the speed increase was well worth it.