Installing SolarWinds NetFlow Analyzer is straightforward, but optimizing it requires planning.

: Full support for NetFlow v5 and v9 , as well as NBAR2 for application-level visibility.

SolarWinds NetFlow Analyzer is a flow-based network monitoring tool that collects, analyzes, and reports on traffic patterns from routers, switches, firewalls, and other flow-enabled devices. Unlike packet sniffers (which capture full packets), NFA works on —statistical summaries of conversations between source and destination IPs, including ports, protocols, and byte/packet counts.

It collects and analyzes flow data from a wide variety of protocols, including Cisco NetFlow v5 and v9 , IPFIX , Juniper J-Flow , sFlow , and Huawei NetStream .