SolarWinds Real-time NetFlow Analyzer is a traffic analysis tool that is designed to analyze the data that passes through your network connection in a 60 minute frame. It shows any request from each and every layer of the OSI model. This is very useful in order to analyze how your bandwidth resources are utilized.

The NetFlow Analyzer consists of two components. The configurator where you specify your device’s hostname and SNMP credentials, and the actual analyzer tool that captures network traffic.

Once you complete the configuration, the rest is as simple as it gets. Select an interface you want to analyze and start the Flow Capture. The collected data is archived to a database for future analysis. This database is compatible with Microsoft Access.

The SolarWinds Real-time NetFlow Analyzer also provides a series of useful tools that you can use right inside the analyzer to simplify your work. Applications like Traceroute, Port Scanner, Telnet or Ping make this an all-in-one compact application.

What I like most about this application is that I am able to analyze the data based upon five different criteria: applications, conversations, domains, endpoints and protocols.

• Applications: Seeing what network traffic every running application makes. The analyzer simply maps the application to the port it uses to send its data, thus making it easy to separate the flow into different groups.
• Conversations: Sorting the traffic referring to the source/destination IP addresses, source and destination port and/or protocol. By matching all these five, you get a single conversation with all its specifications.
• Domains: Using reverse DNS to identify the domain’s IP address and binding all of the conversations with that IP address under the same tree.
• Endpoints: Allowing you to see the traffic directed to/coming from a specific IP address on all ports, without any further separation.
• Protocols: Sorting the network traffic after specific protocols, TCP or UDP. Further separation will be made by individual applications.

All of these features these combined make SolarWinds Real-time NetFlow Analyzer a great tool for monitoring and analyzing network traffic.

SolarWinds makes the Real-time NetFlow Analyzer available at no cost via their web site.