The Top 8 Network Traffic Analysis (NTA) Software

Auvik is a comprehensive network management platform that is designed to improve the network management capabilities of IT professionals.

With Auvik TrafficInsights, users can gain deep visibility into traffic flow across the network. This functionality is compatible with devices supporting NetFlow v5, NetFlow v9, J-Flow, IPFIX, or sFlow, enabling users to monitor network activities and identify potential issues. Using machine learning and traffic classification, Auvik TrafficInsights helps IT professionals to identify applications or protocols consuming a significant amount of network bandwidth. This valuable information empowers decision-makers to consider network upgrades or expansions.

The platform’s easy-to-read charts allow for quick identification of traffic spikes, revealing the source and destination addresses, conversations, and ports. In addition to these features, Auvik. Users can pinpoint unauthorized or unexpected traffic and investigate its legitimacy, taking the necessary steps to protect the network.

If further analysis is required, sampled flow records can be accessed to provide a deeper understanding of the network issue at hand. Overall, Auvik provides a powerful toolset to optimize network management for IT professionals.

Broadcom Symantec Endpoint Protection is a comprehensive security software suite encompassing anti-malware, intrusion prevention, and firewall capabilities for servers and desktop computers. Symantec Security Analytics provides advanced network visibility, real-time threat detection, traffic analysis, and forensic capabilities.

Security Analytics offers essential insights and data capturing, inspecting, indexing, classifying, and enriching all network traffic, including full packets. This data is then stored in an optimized file system, allowing for quick analysis, easy retrieval, and effective reconstruction to support incident response and remediation activities. The appliance-based solution can be deployed at various points in the network, including the perimeter, core, 10GbE backbone, or remote links, ensuring actionable intelligence for efficient incident response and resolution. The platform’s key benefits include faster threat identification with detailed network traffic analysis, packet capture, classification, deep packet inspection, threat data enrichment, and anomaly detection capabilities.

This context-rich information facilitates reduced incident response times and streamlined forensic investigations. Security Analytics integrates with existing cybersecurity infrastructure, enhancing and expediting threat investigation and remediation efforts.

Cisco specializes in hardware, software, and services for simplifying network connectivity and internet solutions. Secure Network Analytics focuses on network security and utilizes industry-leading machine learning and behavioral modeling to help businesses stay ahead of emerging threats.

One of the key features of Cisco Secure Network Analytics is its ability to analyze existing network data to detect potential threats that may have bypassed other security controls. By providing real-time threat detection across the network, Cisco facilitates efficient responses to potential attacks. The system delivers high-fidelity alerts with necessary context, such as user, device, location, timestamp, and application, to enhance security and response time. Another important attribute is its ability to reduce policy violations through policy validation, customization, and streamlining investigations. Cisco Secure Network Analytics also employs advanced analytics to detect unknown malware, insider threats, policy violations, and sophisticated attacks, effectively revealing the unknown and improving network security.

Cisco Secure Network Analytics can identify and isolate threats in encrypted traffic without compromising privacy and data integrity. Additionally, the Secure Cloud Analytics feature provides visibility and threat detection across on-premises networks and major public cloud platforms without the need for software agents.

Darktrace is a cybersecurity company that utilizes machine learning techniques to establish an intrinsic “pattern of life” for every network, device, and user within an organization. By deeply understanding the unique aspects of an organization, Darktrace’s AI-driven solution can take swift action to neutralize threats, regardless of how new and unknown they are.

By utilizing Self-Learning AI, the product adapts to each organization’s normal behavior, focusing on preventing, detecting, and responding to threats in real-time. In addition to providing comprehensive cyber protection, Darktrace minimizes business disruption by responding autonomously to attacks, taking proportionate actions while avoiding interference with daily operations. Darktrace’s Explainable AI incorporates natural language processing, delivers clear reports, and contextualizes information for human decision-making throughout the Cyber AI Loop. Darktrace is trusted by organizations of varying sizes and industries, from SMBs and enterprises to government entities and critical infrastructure providers.

The platform seamlessly integrates into existing workflow systems, including SIEMs, SOARs, and offers single sign-on access as well as enterprise-class security and scalability. Darktrace/Network has been deployed in some of the world’s largest and most complex digital environments, containing hundreds of thousands of devices.

Datadog Network Performance Monitoring is a comprehensive solution offering end-to-end insight into on-premises and cloud networks, including application-layer performance and the health of bare-metal appliances. This monitoring tool gives users full visibility into all network components in various environments without significant overhead, enabling quick identification of network-related issues.

The platform enables real-time network insights through visualizations of network traffic across applications, containers, availability zones, and data centers. It allows tracking of key network metrics such as TCP retransmits, latency, and connection churn, providing a deep understanding of network health. Users can monitor connections between different endpoints at the app, IP address, port, or process ID (PID) layers. Datadog Network Performance Monitoring goes beyond IP addresses to offer communication insights between services, pods, cloud regions, and resources. The platform is ideal for managing cloud networking costs by identifying services and teams accountable for large traffic spikes. Additionally, it provides deep DNS visibility, allowing users to analyze system-wide DNS performance without needing to SSH into individual machines.

The ability to monitor connections to managed cloud services like Amazon S3, Amazon ELB, and GCP BigQuery, helps users identify potential issues and offers more granular insights. With Datadog Network Performance Monitoring, businesses can optimize their network performance and quickly troubleshoot issues in various network environments.

WhatsUp Gold is a network monitoring solution that enables detailed visibility into network traffic, allowing users to see bandwidth consumption and connections to suspicious ports by various applications and protocols. This comprehensive insight helps businesses create bandwidth usage policies, maximize return on ISP costs, and ensure sufficient bandwidth for critical applications and services.

WhatsUp Gold supports various network data collection protocols such as Cisco’s NetFlow, NetFlow-Lite, NSEL, J-Flow, sFlow, and IPFIX, along with CBQoS and NBAR. With its threshold-based alerting system, WhatsUp Gold helps address bandwidth issues before they impact users and applications by sending notifications when bandwidth thresholds are surpassed. The software also allows for in-depth analysis of internet traffic sources, applications consuming bandwidth, and their respective users. This information enables businesses to ensure essential web applications receive the necessary bandwidth and helps make informed decisions about ISP bandwidth needs.

WhatsUp Gold offers a range of out-of-the-box network traffic reports, including interface traffic, bandwidth utilization, top senders and receivers, top applications and protocols, and Class-Based Quality of Service (CBQoS). By providing a clear understanding of network traffic and bandwidth usage, WhatsUp Gold supports businesses in optimizing their network performance and resource allocation.

SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer (NTA) is a network traffic analysis solution that helps IT managers perform in-depth analysis with ease and accuracy. By using customizable reports and alerts, NTA can streamline the process of detecting issues and monitoring current and historical network data such as flow data and CBQoS data.

The software helps uncover specific endpoints and applications that are generating heavy network traffic and creating bottlenecks. With custom tracking options, NTA allows for the monitoring of traffic from various sources, including applications, designated ports, source IPs, destination IPs, and protocols. NTA supports data collection from multiple vendors like NetFlow v5 and v9, Huawei NetStream, Juniper J-Flow, sFlow, IPFIX, and advanced application recognition with NBAR2. It also offers custom, overlapping IP address group analysis. NTA provides an intuitive web-based interface with user-friendly network traffic visualization tools, enabling users to quickly identify peak bandwidth usage and the top network traffic contributors.

The solution also features cross-stack data correlation with the SolarWinds PerfStack feature, allowing users to analyze network data and NetFlow analytics in one view. Additionally, NTA offers class-based quality of service (CBQoS) data through SNMP, helping make changes that improve network traffic flow and quality of service while monitoring the effectiveness of those adjustments.

Wireshark is a widely utilized, open-source network protocol analyzer that enables users to gain deep insights into network activity. Suitable for various purposes, including troubleshooting, network analysis, software and communications protocol development, and education, Wireshark has become the standard in several sectors and institutions.

This versatile packet analyzer offers deep inspection of numerous protocols, live capture and offline analysis capabilities, and a user-friendly three-pane packet browser. It is compatible with multiple platforms, including Windows, Linux, OS X, and FreeBSD. The solution allows users to analyze captured network data both via a graphical interface and the TTY-mode TShark utility. Known for its industry-leading display filters and VoIP analysis features, Wireshark supports a wide array of capture file formats. In addition to compatibility with various file formats, Wireshark allows for on-the-fly decompression of capture files compressed with gzip. The software can read live data from diverse sources, such as Ethernet, Bluetooth, USB, and ATM, depending on the user’s platform.

Furthermore, Wireshark supports decryption for multiple protocols and offers customizable coloring rules for an efficient and intuitive analysis experience. With export capabilities for formats like XML, PostScript, and CSV, Wireshark simplifies network analysis and provides valuable insights for professionals and educational institutions alike.