What needs improvement with SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer?

The plotting of the device on the map is not appropriate. It should be like a Meraki cloud, where if you are familiar with Meraki devices, you can locate any device directly on the world map.

SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer could improve its flexibility and integration with AI to provide analytics beyond just showing up/down statuses and traffic volumes.

The analysis can utilize algorithms like K-means clustering or associative neural networks for predictions rather than relying on generative AI, which is more suited for text. For example, by setting parameters and analyzing current network growth trends of 2% to 3%, the tool can predict when a specific network segment might run out of bandwidth—in six months, eight months, or a year. This allows for early planning and proactive management of network resources.

The product is the response. SolarWinds team's response when there is an issue with the responsiveness to address some of the issues is very slow. And also, if I have a priority issue that needs to be fixed, they don't understand the customer's pain. They go their own way of doing things. They don't understand the customer's pain. Second, they don't assess the impact. If my monitoring system is not available, maybe something is not getting monitored, or I am unable to pull some availability reports. Maybe I'm unable to analyze it. They don't understand the impact of that unavailability on the business users. This is the only source of truth where I can go ahead and talk to my business and say that, hey, it is not because of XYZ, but because of this reason. Maybe there could be a possibility that business might be running heavy app job schedules, which might have impacted the network traffic during business hours. If I want to point that out, I need this tool to be available. I'm not saying it should be 100% available, but at least if there is an issue, people should understand and react. There should be some sense of urgency. This product has a lot more capabilities. If SolarWinds is focused more on how the industry is trending toward creating some dashboards and user-friendly dashboards or a little bit of customization. I guess SolarWinds has more capabilities. The representation might require a little bit of a tweak because SolarWinds has been in the industry for a longer time. But due to responsiveness of the support and the features. The product is coming up with a lot of features, but the navigation or the way it is being perceived by the customers is not right because of a lack of documentation or the lack of responsiveness as well as a lack of dashboards, especially on the dashboards. When I use a monitoring tool, it is a single source of truth. If I need to run an NOC or a SOC, it is the only dashboard I can look at, my Analyzer or my technical teams. But that single pane of view is not reversible. Many customers where I have seen it integrate this with either an open source like Grafana or some Power BI to have their own way of giving the dashboards. That is not necessary because if I compare it with other products, they have their own dashboards, which I can customize, but that's not the case with SolarWinds.

The solution should improve its automation feature. It's quite limited compared to other products. There is less automation provisioning, requiring much manual work from engineering technicians. If the automation were improved, it would be much better. It would be easy to implement and integrate future requirements.

In terms of improvement, it can be complex to set up and configure, and the user guides provided can also be complex, especially when dealing with certain configuration aspects. Improved SQL capabilities would be useful in the future.

There is room for improvement when it comes to the traffic generated by the analyzer and the analysis of that traffic. They need to work on it more because when it generates traffic, SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer doesn't show the source and destination IPs, which is essential to understand. It only shows the ports being used and what they are communicating with. SolarWinds does not have a monitoring solution for this, so they need to include a feature that can show where the IPs and systems are communicating, as third-party solutions can do. There is a definition system that defines bad websites to your standards, and when your system communicates with that system, it flags it. However, SolarWinds cannot do that. It only shows you the telemetry, and there's no more visibility into what is happening outside the network. If you are connected to an IP outside your network, you won't know what it is. It doesn't have any intelligence to add to the flow. It's just slow. It needs to be more of a robust tool that adds intelligence to the flow. When it shows you the flow, it should be able to tell you if the traffic is harmful to other sites.

The solution's configuration had some issues in the beginning. They should work on the configuration of the Log Analyzer feature.

An area for improvement in SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer is the dashboarding. The user interface also has room for improvement because it's currently clunky.

For the most part, our customers are satisfied with the features already present within NTA, as they mainly use it for checking to see if their bandwidth usage is okay and within reason. One area that we struggle with is the price. Because the price of this solution is so high, we are largely unable to introduce it into the local market, and only the banking sector has the means to afford it. The biggest reason for this is because SolarWinds charges their users per ports, such that if you have a 24-port switch, they will charge you for 24 nodes, rather than count it as one single switch. In contrast, solutions such as ManageEngine NetFlow Analyzer charge users per switch, which they count as a single node. Besides the pricing, I also think that the technical support could be better. When we call SolarWinds' tech support, it usually takes at least 10 to 15 minutes for a response. And when you send an email, you will again have to wait some time for a response, and sometimes this can be upwards of four to five hours.

As people always complain about the pricing for SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer, it's an area for improvement in the solution. People find it expensive. Another area for improvement in SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer is support, as it could be better.

NTA's documentation for the implementation phase needs some enhancement.

I'm expecting to see a little bit more artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms. They need a bit more sophistication in that. We'd like more user input into the analysis, not just what they provide. It'll be good to put some user inputs like business timing, high volume of traffic, et cetera. With that, we could be more responsive. All analytics could basically be more in-depth.

There are some areas for improvement in SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer. There are some challenges with the solution when compared to other monitoring tools such as difficulty in operations and difficulty with backup installation. My team is currently trying out different solutions but would need to see how it goes. What I'd like to see in the next release of SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer is a change in the way data is being collected and displayed on the graph. Currently, data is being measured every fifteen seconds, but it would be better if it's measured in minutes, in particular, five, ten, or fifteen minutes. As an administrator, I feel it would be easier and more helpful if SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer collects data every five, ten, or fifteen minutes, rather than in seconds. Doing this would also give more accurate data.

I'd like to see some additional security and more efficient support for the solution.

If your network is on SolarWinds, and you notice that the traffic is bad because it says "user downloading a heavy file," it doesn't indicate which endpoint is downloading those heavy files. SolarWinds doesn't have the tools to be able to handle this kind of situation. You can just notice through your network device that the traffic is becoming overwhelming or heavy, but you cannot go inside and get more details related to the endpoint where it is happening. We would like SolarWinds to be able to handle this kind of situation and even manage the traffic inside a network from the endpoint to the network device. These would be good enhancements. It is mostly stable. The problem comes only when we want to add another SolarWinds model. SolarWinds has so many models, and sometimes when we want to add other models on the platforms that are reserved for our firm, it freezes. When this happens, we have to create a new VM for that model.

I would like to see more artificial intelligence capabilities.

I would like to see better customization capabilities.

It's not a cheap product, so the pricing could be improved.

It's scalable, but it could be simplified because it's not completely easy. The price could be reduced to make this product more competitive. Support could have a better response time.

The pricing is expensive.

The licensing should be improved. I don't like the licensing because it is geared to the interface and not the device, which increases the cost. The Atlas module that is used for building the network map is very bad. I would like to see improvements made to the dashboard configuration. They should provide more templates for the vendors.

This solution does not do a very good job when I am trying to look deeper into my internal network, in particular with respect to individual ports.

Regarding SolarWinds, no major comment or improvement. We just use it. Because it's an old-school technique, we only rely on it for alerts, events, system logs, etc. That's why I said we don't put any effort into it. Since we've only just begun using ThousandEyes, we're not sure yet. But there probably will be issues.

One thing I have noticed is that it is very slow to pick the dynamics of the network, so that is something that could be improved. There is some sort of lag in the reporting, and I would like to see that being faster.

Sometimes the system is confusing; they should simplify it to make it easier in future releases. There are many applications we cannot monitor with the solution. They need to open it up to make it easier to monitor across multiple apps. The solution needs to work with Windows 2003 and 2008. Technical support needs improvement.

I recognize that SolarWinds has a reporting feature that will give us reports that we can customize. However, it's not clear how I can integrate the existing solution like BI solutions to SolarWinds. The solution seems to lack an API for other integrations. The price of the solution is a bit high for our clients. They should consider adjusting their price model. We'd like more application control in future releases. automatic identification of applications in the traffic. this feature is included in the new generation firewall.

The biggest problem with SolarWinds is that they've tried to integrate a lot into the core modules. I think it would actually really benefit if they are more focused. It's packing a lot of technology in now, it's very confusing areas in respect to what the product can potentially do. Even though it's split into very specific core modules, there's quite a lot of overlap. I think anybody being dropped in front of SolarWinds for the first time could initially be overwhelmed. I think it's a very comprehensive product. It could do to even be toned down a bit. It is very powerful. They keep on pushing more and more features and I don't think it's a good thing, because we've noted quite a few stability issues with the product. I'm not saying 100% of it is all SolarWinds really related, but it's doing a lot. It's a very complex product and it's difficult to troubleshoot it when it goes wrong. The problem is that SolarWinds is trying to bolt in too much and that can leave bugs, which you have to then sort out, leaving the product unstable. SolarWinds needs to try and slow down and improve the stability of the product, as opposed to bringing out more and more features.

One of the things that can be improved is the licensing, as it is limited to a number of nodes. They limit it to five hundred nodes before jumping to the next level. When we exceeded that limit, we had to go directly to two thousand nodes. We did not really need that many but I still had to pay for that. The licensing should be more realistic so that we can adjust the number of nodes according to my needs, rather than in fixed increments. For example, one thousand nodes would have been enough. Jumping to four times the volume was too much. We recently upgraded to a more recent version of this solution and we had an issue with backing up the data. We were unable to make proper use of the databases from the previous version.

This solution would benefit from having more security-based communications between the actual devices and the software itself. After dealing with a bunch of other vendors who are very security-focused, it would be nice to see that included in other products as well. It may be a case where they have not kept up with certain security aspects as technology has changed. I would like to see visual maps for all of the devices that are interconnected. They do have a feature that exists now, but I think that it can be worked on. There are some competitors out there that are doing a better job at that.

One improvement could be the system intelligence. I think another would be to show a kind of session mark that shows you the latency between each hub, but with much more intelligence. I know they do that but to make something that works very well I would want to see more terminals so that I can look where the need is happening. Of course, the network could be much better. I need to see something with AI. I know they don't have it, and I need to see straight through to integration and cloud monitoring. The application for monitoring should be enhanced with a better quality experience, in terms with what their customers are going through. Instead of looking at Bit-Coin sites they need to have insights like translating.

I had a problem during the installation of this solution, and I was not able to find a solution in their forum. I would like to have a more efficient and more complete forum for support. I was eventually able to find the solution on another site. I would like to see more training videos and additional material for learning how to use this solution. Better integration and communication with third-party tools, including other NPMs such as Nagios, is needed.