The health of a network is critical to the success of a modern organization. Network administrators monitor how their systems operate efficiently and without interruption. One of the most effective tools in their arsenal is Network Traffic Analysis.
What is Network Traffic Analysis?
Network Traffic Analysis (NTA) monitors network usage and performance to identify anomalies. It monitors network traffic for security threats and issues like slow download speeds or throughput. NTA tools track, record and analyze network traffic patterns and compare them with established benchmarks to identify discrepancies.
Simply put, NTA identifies who or what is using network bandwidth. It provides administrators additional visibility by collecting network traffic data such as flow and packet data and extracting useful metadata, including IP addresses, ports, traffic protocols or traffic volume. NTA also has security benefits. Think of data breaches or DDoS attacks. NTA detects attacks like these by spotting abnormal traffic. Flagging these abnormal traffic conditions helps administrators to act before it's too late.
Check out our YouTube video on NTA+.
Troubleshooting Challenges
Your network is a complex collection of devices and systems requiring 24/7 availability. When issues arise, IT must resolve them and management expects fast results before customers leave and users become unproductive. However, if the IT team uses numerous tools, troubleshooting and solving these problems can be difficult.
The more tools an IT team needs to diagnose a problem, the worse their performance becomes. Using one solution for infrastructure, another for network traffic analysis and a third for network performance monitoring and diagnostics leads to finger-pointing and delay.
To diagnose network issues, you should have visibility into your IT infrastructure and deploy advanced network traffic analysis. This will give you insights into application performance, virtual machines, wireless devices, cloud resources, device logs, device configurations and security threat detection and response. It will also save time, improve efficiency and dramatically reduce your Mean Time to Resolution (MTTR).
IT Infrastructure Monitoring (ITIM) solutions provide a must-have dashboard to help NetOps professionals understand the health, uptime status and utilization of IT assets like servers or network components. Users can experience poor performance, which can only be diagnosed by analyzing the IP traffic that flows across the network.
Introducing Network Traffic Analysis Plus (NTA+)
Network Traffic Analysis Plus (NTA+) is the new enterprise-grade network traffic monitoring solution for Progress WhatsUp Gold. NTA+ helps to reduce troubleshooting times and easily determine the root-cause analysis of application performance issues like network errors, outages, configuration issues and performance degradation. With real-time analysis and raw historical data and trends, you can determine if the network, connections or applications are the problem.
NTA+ comes with prebuilt dashboards, reports and analytical functions that show the top N statistics—like users, applications and systems—but can get as granular as individual communication flows across the entire network. It enables hybrid network monitoring (on-premises, cloud, hybrid) and is as simple to deploy as deploying a single virtual appliance.
Network Traffic Analysis Plus (NTA+) is part of the WhatsUp Gold Enterprise Plus tier subscription.
Key Benefits
- Greater Network Compatibility: NTA+ can process data in all standard formats, such as NetFlow, IPFIX, sFlow, jFlow or NetStream. Its support for exported data from any device allows for smoother network integration.
- Hybrid Environment-Ready: NTA+ provides uniform transparency throughout the public cloud, on-premises or hybrid environments via native cloud traffic mirroring and heterogeneous data processing capabilities.
- Increased Data Versatility: NTA+ can be a solution for network data analysis, allowing the user to see the “big picture.” It can also be used as a proxy to forward data to security or analytical platforms or as reliable data storage.
- Optimized Performance: NTA+ has the highest flow per second per appliance performance on the market. Its database system is built for fast data processing and has enough space to store the resulting amounts.
How to Learn More About NTA+
Watch our On-Demand Webinar, “Reveal Hidden Network Issues with Network Traffic Analysis Plus” which covers the ins and outs of NTA+ with a demonstration.
Or feel free to try WhatsUp Gold yourself! You can download a free trial version with all features and no restrictions for a limited time.