Because of cost, we recently moved from the Fluke(Crannog) Netflow Tracker product to the Solarwinds Netflow Traffic Analyzer. Perhaps it's just the "learning a new product" blues but so far, I feel like I've replaced my dashboard gauges with idiot lights.
When I choose a device in Netflow Tracker, I get a chart of all the reporting interfaces showing inbound and outbound utilization. Select an interface and I get a differentiated bar chart of all inbound and outbound traffic. I select a timeframe, right click and I get about a bazillion options to filter the selected data. I can view inbound, outbound or all traffic. I can view it by source, destination, conversation or any of dozens of other viewpoints. Once I've selected and viewed my filtered data, I can filter THAT again to further isolate whatever traffic I'm looking for, if necessary.
With Netflow Traffic Analyzer, I get to filter by endpoint or application. Fine. So I type in the address of my workstation and click on search. What do I get? I get the list of all interfaces and I get to open each interface one at a time (twiddle thumbs while waiting for the view to build) to see if there was traffic? Once I get all my routers in Netflow that would be an all day project. No thanks.
With Netflow Tracker, I get to see ALL the selected data. The top ten are specifically charted and the rest are lumped into a group called "Others". This way, if I selected inbound or outbound traffic, I get to see TOTAL bandwidth used and how much my top talkers are using individually.
With Netflow Traffic Analyzer, I get the Top XX conversations, or Top XX whatevers. I even have to figure out myself if it's inbound or outbound traffic so my Top displayed talker(s) may not even be involved if I'm having an inbound problem and the top talkers are outbound. I also don't know percentage of bandwidth utilized since both inbound and outbound traffic are reported in this Top XX approach.
I even thought I'd be sneaky so I put an interface bandwidth utilization chart at the top of my Netflow Interface Details View so I'd at least be able to have utilization data in the same view I was using but all I got was a little square with an X in it...not very helpful.
As a last resort I even checked the manual.....no help. I looked for tutorials, none exist.
So....I really have to wonder...am I missing something? Maybe someone has created a bunch of reports to alleviate all the issues I'm having? I'd sure appreciate some feedback.
Dan Goodale - Network Engineer
Triwest Healthcare
