NetFlow (NTA) Module Database sizing

Hi Mr. Baumgartner,

we have a few customers with approx the same amount of Flows they have a 12 Core VM with 64GB RAM. This should be OK for your environment.

Kind Regards,

Holger Mundt

For your storage question, I manage two separate instances of SolarWinds.  We upgraded to NTA4.2 and the Flow Storage datastore back in August.  Since then, I've been tracking the flow storage size.  Since September, the Flow Database consumes roughly the storage below (it may vary slightly week to week based on increasing/decreasing number of flows, but this is a good average):

Instance 1 - ~70,000 flows per second - 360GB Storage

Instance 2 - ~32,000 flows per second - 200GB Storage

Since it doesn't seem to be entirely linear, you may want to allocate more than 120GB just to allow for growth and to ensure you have enough space.

Thanks for your Answers!

There is a KB article on FSBD sizing which may also be of interest:

https://support.solarwinds.com/Success_Center/Netflow_Traffic_Analyzer_(NTA)/Determine_the_right_size_of_NTA_Flow_Storage_Drive

Automatic:

1. Login to the SolarWinds Web Console > Settings.
2. Go to the product's specific Settings > NTA settings > Database Settings > NTA Flow storage Database Settings.
3. Click Database Size > Calculate.

You should be able to see the size of your NTA database and the projected size based on your retention period.

Manual:

1. Login to SolarWinds Web Console > Settings.
2. Go to the product's specific settings > NTA settings > Database Settings > NTA Flow storage Database Settings > Location > Remote Access that Server.
3. On the NTA flow storage server, click Start > Search > NTA flow storage configurator.
4. Launch NTA flow storage configurator, and copy the path where it saves.
5. Open the flow folder, and copy all folders in the following format with the numbers being the date.
   TN#2016-04-11@0_0
6. Click the Date yesterday > All folder files, and right-click Properties.
7. Check the Size of disk.
8. Multiply it to the Database retention you have.
   Example: 1GB/day X 30 days (retention) = 30 GB

I suggest you have 500GB to 1 TB of storage available and ready..this data grows fast, and I can pretty much guarantee you're going to use it

Hi all,

we use it since my question and i can tell you this:

with a retention period of 90 days and 7500 flows per second average, the database is around 550GB big.

hope this helps someone

br