Let me start by saying, I hope that everyone had a great Thanksgiving. At our house, we fried two turkeys this year. It was the first time that we attempted this, and after reading all the warnings that came with the new fryer, I guess the fact that no one got hurt means that the holiday was a success.

Last week I began a series of blogs that introduce you to the new Flow Analytic tools that are available with Plixer International’s latest NetFlow and sFlow analysis tool, Scrutinizer v7.3.

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With the barrage of applications today sharing similar behavior characteristics at the protocol level, it becomes necessary to take deep packet inspection steps to determine what the actual application is that is causing the traffic.  Thankfully, Cisco already does this for us with something called Network-Based Application Recognition (NBAR) .   We explained NBAR support in a recent blog and how it allows us to improve on network traffic analysis.

Once you enable NBAR exports with NetFlow you will notice that since it supports Flexible NetFlow, a few different templates get kicked out.

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Michael Patterson
Scrutinizer Product Manager

A NetFlow collector that can scan is important for many of our larger customers. Nearly 500 of our customers are collecting Cisco NetFlow and/or sFlow from over 100 devices. We understand that a NetFlow analyzer solution that can scale is important.

Scrutinizer Scales
I was working with a government customer last week. Check out the vitals on his Scrutinizer, which is receiving NetFlow from 440 routers with a combined 1736 interfaces. You might be surprise how often I see a huge volume of routers and a fairly light aggregate NetFlow volume. As you can see, Scrutinizer was chugging right along.

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Michael Patterson
Scrutinizer Product Manager

With the release of Scrutinizer v7.2 last month we offered an upgrade/migration path for those customers running Scutinizer v6. I have had some customers ask, “Why should we upgrade” or “What will we gain from Scrutinizer v7 that we don’t have now?”

The updated release of Plixer’s network traffic analyzer last week made the answer to that question very clear.

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Apparently, many WAN Optimization companies price their appliances based on Flow Volume.  What does Flow Volume mean?  Flow Volume is the number of concurrent flows on a specific interface or all interfaces at any given time.  For example, if you download a web page, this could create several flows.  If you ping something, this would create a flow as well.  In fact, syslogs, SNMP traps, etc. all create flows.  TCP tends to create flows that linger longer than ICMP or UDP flows. Read more »

Michael Patterson
Scrutinizer Product Manager

With the release of Scrutinizer v7.3, we’ve been advertising the support of a couple of new filters that focus around reporting on NBAR. HURRAY!

But in case you don’t know exactly what NBAR is or why its so very cool, lets take a step back and look at what it does for us:

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After a lot of work, we have support in Scrutinizer v7.3 with Flow Analytics for NBAR with Flexible NetFlow.  My contact at Cisco Jean-Charles <below> gave us some help. I wish we had him as a resident Cisco NBAR and NetFlow expert.  Read more »

Michael Patterson
Scrutinizer Product Manager

Plixer International, developers of a market leading NetFlow and sFlow analysis tool set, today released Scrutinizer NetFlow & sFlow Analyzer version 7.3, bringing network traffic analysis software to the next level.

With the latest release of their NetFlow analyzer, Plixer has introduced several new report types, including NBAR reports. Cisco’s NBAR technology does deep packet inspection into the traffic moving through the router to identify the applications being used by hosts. For example; H323, Telnet, RTP, Exchange and Skype are identified and exported in NetFlow.

“We feel, and have felt for some time, that Flexible NetFlow has the potential to expand greatly on the level of information that can be reported on by standard NetFlow,” says Plixer CTO, Marc Bilodeau. “With Scrutinizer NetFlow & sFlow Analyzer version 7.3, Plixer is leading the pack in not only the adoption of Flexible NetFlow, but in the implementation of its key advantages over other versions of NetFlow.”

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Jon Mills
Marketing & Public Relations Manager
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Looks like Vyatta has joined the mix of vendors supporting NetFlow and sFlow. According to the Vyatta press release, it requires an upgrade to VC6 of their operating system which is still in alpha development. This will make them the first company I’m familiar with that supports both technologies on the same hardware. Typically vendors implement sFlow in hardware, but Vyatta did it in software as they did NetFlow v5 and v9 support.
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I have been receiving a number of calls lately with requests to enable SSL on Scrutinizer v7.

Enabling SSL on Scrutinizer v7 has been made much easier than in past releases of Scrutinzer. You no longer need to download OpenSSL and manually configure the SSL Key and certificate, or set up the apache config files.

You must first contact Technical Support at Plixer International, to obtain the Scrutinizer v7 – SSL installshield.

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