Hi there guys! Its Thursday afternoon and the snow is beginning to fall here in New England. I’ve heard talk about 1-2 ft worth of snow, but you know those weathermen…

But before we close shop here for the holiday weekend, I wanted to be sure and announce the release of a small patch that provides a few small fixes that we wanted to squeak in before the next big release.

To find the latest update for your favorite NetFlow traffic analysis tool, just clicky clicky on the link below:

Scrutinizer v7.3.2 update

And we at Plixer all hope you have safe and restful New Years!

-Nate

As much as I would like to see more companies switch over to IPv6 it isn’t going to happen overnight.  Like anything involving an expensive migration process, you should ask yourself some questions.
When do businesses need to move to the new system and what are the advantages of switching over to IPv6? Why make the move?  I don’t think you have to but, be aware that IPv6 use has grown by 300% over the past 2 years. Read more »

Michael Patterson
Scrutinizer Product Manager

Many NetFlow Reporting applications claim to tell you who the top 10 bandwidth hogs are by displaying the top 10 or so hosts for a time period based on total amount of traffic sent or received.  Yes, this is helpful but it can paint a distorted picture when it comes to network traffic analysis.  What about Flow Volume? Read more »

Michael Patterson
Scrutinizer Product Manager

A common occurrence and cause for data loss in Scrutinizer prior to version 7 has been crashed database tables.  It has also been the subject of many calls to our technical support group. Due to the large amount of NetFlow data received by NetFlow collectors, corrupted database tables can cause a large amount of data loss in a short period of time.

To minimize data loss and support time required to repair the corrupted database tables, in version 7 of our NetFlow and sFlow analyzer, we have introduced the ‘self-healing’ database.

A MySQL database check and repair is run on a regularly scheduled basis, once an hour.  If the database check finds any corrupted database tables, it will attempt the repair.  If it is unable to repair, an alarm will be generated to Scrutinizer to alert you of the corrupted table.
Read more »

I took a call the other day from a customer who asked, “How do I set up my router to send NetFlow to Scrutinizer?” This is a question that I get on a pretty regular basis, so I strapped on my router config hat and got ready to throw out the typical IP FLOW commands to get the flows going. But then I asked for the model of the router. “It’s a Cisco Nexus 7000,” the customer told me. I found that this device does not run the usual IOS that we have all come to know and love. It runs Cisco’s NX-OS. And Cisco’s NX-OS CLI is completely different.

Cisco NX-OS supports a flexible architecture that allows a user to collect different data for different applications per interface. It allows you to define an optimal flow record for a particular application by selecting the keys from a large collection of predefined fields, whereas the Cisco IOS Software supports one flow mask and export pair for the entire chassis.

Read more »

With today’s blog, I want to do two things for my customers: the first being to remind you that any custom report filters you create can be imported into MyView.

Secondly, once you import that report into MyView, how to hack the bejeezus out of it to get what display you’d like.

Let me explain…

Read more »

If you missed the NetFlow training webinars Plixer offered over the last three days, then feel free to watch the recording we made of Thursday’s presentation. The webinar, which covered Cisco ASA and NBAR NetFlow reporting, was presented by Scrutinizer NetFlow & sFlow Analyzer Product Manager, Michael Patterson.

As always, keep an eye out for emails from Plixer for future webinar invitations. We also try to post many of these signups on our blog. Thanks for watching!

Jon Mills
Marketing & Public Relations Manager
Follow Me On Twitter

Join one of our upcoming webinars on Cisco ASA and NBAR NetFlow Reporting. Agenda - Cisco NetFlow: Intro and how to report on it. - Cisco ASA NetFlow exports and how to interpret the data. - Cisco NBAR reporting for layer 7 application reports (e.g. who is using: Skype, kazaa2, RTP, etc.). Register for one of the times below » Tuesday, Dec. 15 @ 11am EST » Wednesday, Dec. 16 @ 9am EST » Thursday, Dec. 17 @ 1pm EST

Jon Mills
Marketing & Public Relations Manager
Follow Me On Twitter

Since Scrutinizer v7 and the data migration from v6 has been released, we have been just out straight with support, including sending upgrading instructions, assisting with upgrades, helping customers get acclimated to the totally new interface, and troubleshooting the inevitable issues that arise with a new release of code.

So it was with great relief and gratitude to Michael Patterson, President and CEO, and Marc Bilodeau, CIO, that we enjoyed our Christmas company celebration this past Saturday.
Read more »

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

Today I will be introducing you to the fourth of the new analytic tools now available with Scrutinizer v7.3. The Top Flows algorithm utilizes Flow Analytics – Top Flows, and checks to see if hosts involved with large numbers of flows have a large percentage of flows that are incomplete. This  is determined by looking at the TCP flags field in each flow record.

If it is a TCP flow record and it does not have the FIN flag set, it could indicate a host that is not able to make a full connection to the host it is trying  to reach. This is typical for things like port scans and even P2P applications. Another possibility is that a host just has a misconfigured application that needs to be addressed.

Read more »