NetFlow data is primarily used for capturing and analyzing network traffic patterns. By collecting this data, network administrators can monitor traffic flow, volume, and trends over time, which helps in network planning, traffic analysis, and detecting anomalies or security breaches. In contrast, configuring switches is more about setting up network devices to handle data appropriately, and protocol packet and byte counts refer to detailed statistics a network device collects for each protocol it handles. Meanwhile, CPU utilization patterns relate to how much processing power a device is consuming, which is different from traffic pattern analysis.