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NPM & NTA Vs Network Bandwidth Analyzer Pack

Heloo,

I am wondering what is the difference between buying NPM then buy NTA and bying "Network Bandwidth Analyzer Pack" which is NPM+NTA ? is there any benefit ?

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rschroeder

I don't have the definitive answer, but one way of looking at it might be examining how much expense and inconvenience you're willing to incur all at once.

If you buy NPM, you've got a good chunk of work in front of you. It'll take serious time to implement it and understand it and create the right kinds of alerts and reports if you've a large network. Likely months, maybe a year or more, depending on how much time you can afford to spend on it, your network size, and how big your helping team is.

After you have NPM working and the right people are getting the information and alerts and reports they need from it, then you might consider other modules to add on, like NCM or NTA.

We bought NPM, then added in NCM once we understood the benefits of automated configuration backups and management and restoration on our network switches & routers. NCM paid for itself pretty quickly in reduced downtime and security remediation / compliance.

But we were unable to see which devices and applications or protocols were using up all the bandwidth between some of our WAN sites, some of which only had a T1 or two, or low broadband speeds. NTA solved that issue (see a glamorized example I wrote up about one NTA experience here: A Halloween Network Tale ) by allowing us to see which IP addresses were the ones having the largest impact on the network, and what type of network traffic they were sharing.

If we hadn't had WAN pipes that were unexpectedly filling during the day (only Citrix corporate/internal traffic was expected--all low bandwidth), we wouldn't have seen the need for NTA immediately. When some of my other sites started experiencing WAN bandwidth depletion I found the corporate level folks had deployed LAN-based high-bandwidth-apps across the WAN, and just one person using one of those apps would continually cause all other traffic at a site to be dropped. Again, NTA was able to quickly identify the causes and associated flows and conversations, making it possible for my team to focus on removing the problem apps or upgrading bandwidth at those sites accordingly.

But without a good set of folks sharing the load with you, I think you may find that getting NTA and NPM simultaneously might be a bit of overload if your network is large.

You make the call--what's most important?

Learning what's down, when it went down, when it came back up, how long it's been down, what it affected, what SLA's are impacted, etc.? This is NPM's job, and it does it (and many other detailed tasks) very well.
Backing up configurations for easy restoration in case of equipment failure or fat fingered humans, plus compliance reporting and automated problem remediation? This are some of the powerful and useful things NCM can do for you.
Discovering which devices and applications and flows are consuming your bandwidth? NTA does this.

ahmed.soliman

well this might be the case if I am new with Solarwinds, now you are experienced with NPM & NTA , then you want to apply them for your customer, which option you choose ? price wise, if both products combined are equal to the price of the pack, so why the pack was invented from the first place ?

rschroeder

You've found the issue on which to focus: discounted price for buying more than one module. If the price of two modules is significantly lower than buying each separately, now you have found the incentive to purchase two modules.

I would not be surprised to learn a Solarwinds salesperson would give more and steeper discounts if you were purchasing just before the end of their sales quarter or sales year. Much like many salespeople (car sales people in particular), they're often willing to offer more discounts the closer they are to their personal goals or their schedule for quarterly or annual sales cut offs.

designerfx

echoing rschroeder as being exactly correct - bundles are cheaper, but it really depends on what you want to do with solarwinds. Depending on the environment and the scope for most businesses I would definitely suggest NPM NTA SAM as the first modules to focus on if possible, because they offer probably the largest amount of value up front and work well. Obviously this requires that the scope of things you need to monitor includes: servers, networking equipment and routers/switches.

bhagyashri_hegde

Hi,

So basically, NTA is most helpful in analyzing the bandwidth and NPM is for SNMP devices. Also, could you please let me know how can i get additional knowledge on Solarwinds installation and configuration? Is there any guide from Solarwinds?

rschroeder

Let's slightly modify the use of NPM, since it's much more than a tool for monitoring SNMP devices. Some of the many other things I use NPM for include:

Mapping connections between nodes and displaying them graphically, with the ability to drill into them and see throughput and connection speeds
Monitoring the status of all nodes in the network. I can quickly see which nodes are up and which are down.
Deduplicating alerts caused by nodes dependent upon other nodes higher up in the network. If the only router to a site is down, we don't need alerts from dozens of switches & UPS's saying they're down, too. The Dependencies feature saves a lot of alerts from firing that aren't useful.
Seeing WAN port errors, data center port errors, port-channel errors & lost links
Displaying the nodes that were down within the last 24 hours so we can validate and understand problems and work towards preventing or minimizing them
Searching for nodes
Displaying nodes with high memory utilization or high average CPU load so they can be diagnosed and corrected
Showing the Hardware Health Overview of all nodes--great for discovering when a network room's temperature is too high, or when a redundant power supply has lost power or failed, or when stack power is in use due to the power supply in another switch has failed and is now running on the redundant PS in a different switch, etc.
Tying into NCM, Displaying which devices have been successfully inventoried and backed up today
Monitoring drive space on nodes
Displaying the current battery up time capabilities of UPS's (we want to know if load has increased any any UPS has less than 30 minutes of run time on it if power were to fail)
Finding connected ports of monitored nodes, searching for interfaces
Displaying the status of the Solarwinds polling engines' environments
Providing a single pane of glass from which Netflow from NTA and configurations from NCM can be easily accessed and displayed
Showing Advanced Syslog Counts in one screen, which enables me to drill into any category and see what's being reported quickly
Parsing Syslog messages
Displaying the devices whose support will end in the next three months, or that has already ended
Displaying the top border router ports by utilization--sweet for knowing which WAN circuits are most close being fully utilized so we can plan for expansion or do filtering or change QoS/CoS
Displaying Wireless Heat Maps
Displaying connected VPN users

And SO MUCH MORE! That's just what I have on my NPM front page. There's MUCH more to drill into, including MANY reports that are available (some of which I run on demand, others that fire off automatically and e-mail themselves to team members or our boss).

On the other hand NTA is a specialized section of SolarWinds' Suite that can be easily displayed in or accessed from the NPM front page. You're correct that NTA is used to display Netflow information. I use it to show:

The complete NTA summary of all items, including useful pie charts showing percentages, heaviest hitters, destinations, domains, etc.
Specific conversations sorted by volume or source or destination IP addresses
Endpoints
Transmitters or Receivers
Protcols
ToS
BGP info
Applications
Countries

I get so much useful information out of NPM and NTA, as well as from NCM, that I couldn't do my job properly without these or some equivalent products (that wouldn't tie into a single pane of glass).

rschroeder

There are great resources available for planning and installation guidance. You can find them at Success Center - SolarWinds Worldwide, LLC. Help and Support

Thwack.com is also a super place to do research about installations, learn processes and prerequisites, and discover solutions. Just go to the main page at Thwack.com and use the Product Forums dropdown to see links to any product in which you are interested:

Next to that are the Resources and Events links. Check them out for even more useful details about systems and learning what's right for your environment.

Swift packets!

Rick Schroeder