This weekend I took a break from NetFlow and sFlow network traffic analysis to join the Moxie Outdoor Adventure whitewater rafting crew and take on the Kennebec River rapids.
Paul DubeI was talking with our newly appointed Pre-Sales Support Specialist, Scott, the other day when we realized that we don’t have a NetFlow Glossary blog, so I wanted to take this opportunity to consolidate some resources and highlight some of the key NetFlow terminology that we find ourselves talking about on a daily basis.
NetFlow Terminology:
Bidirectional Flows
Flexible NetFlow
Ingress vs. Egress
Interface 0
ip-flow timeout active 1
IPFIX
ip route-cache flow vs. ip flow ingress
NBAR
NetFlow Collector and Analyzer
NetFlow Exporters
NetFlow Options Templates
NetFlow Probe
NetFlow Replicator
NetFlow v5 vs. v9
NSEL
sFlow
With businesses of today relying heavily on internet connectivity for business critical applications, awareness of what’s happening on your network is becoming more important than ever. With NetFlow and sFlow enabled routers and switches, our network analysis tool can be configured to automatically email reports letting you know exactly who or what is using your valuable bandwidth.
Paul DubeA customer called in the other day after they had set up a map in Scrutinizer NetFlow and sFlow Analyzer. They had some blank connections to devices that didn’t support NetFlow and they were asking if there was anything they could do to make the map more useful for these devices. I asked them if they used our SNMP trender Denika, and they said, “Yes.” So, we set up the integration with Denika and Scrutinizer, then started configuring Denika connections on their Scrutinizer Map.
Paul Dube 
Lately, I’ve been getting more familiar with different backup procedures and it made me want to update everyone on our current recommended Scrutinizer backup procedure. Read more »
Flexible NetFlow and IPFIX, being the future of NetFlow, allow network devices to export more than just traditional IP flow statistics such as NetFlow NBAR, website URL’s, network latency, and in this case interface names. Let’s take a look at exporting interfaces names with NetFlow.
Paul DubeGreetings Spiceworks IT managers! Did you know you can integrate our Scrutinizer NetFlow and sFlow analysis tool into your Spiceworks IT management desktop?
Today, I’m going to talk about how to integrate Nagios with Scrutinizer. Nagios is an IT infrastructure monitoring tool that helps organizations ensure systems, applications, services and business processes are functioning properly. By integrating Scrutinizer into Nagios network administrators will have the ability to run NetFlow reports on their devices, have Scrutinizer dashlets, and view network usage maps all from one place. You can learn more about Nagios by taking a trip to their website.
In today’s information technology world, security is an increasingly important topic and having the right tools for the job is utterly necessary. So, you ask yourself, how can a NetFlow and sFlow analysis tool help you? Scrutinizer gives you the ability to monitor all the traffic on your network to identify IP addresses, bandwidth and port usage, possible threats, and any IPFIX or Flexible NetFlow custom fields, but what if you could go even deeper?
Paul DubeHello all, today I’m going to tell you about one of my favorite features in Scrutinizer that helps aid in NetFlow traffic monitoring; the MyView dashboard. The MyView page is a fully customizable dashboard that allows each user to have their own unique view of what’s happening on the network which allows administrators to be proactive instead of reactive.
Paul Dube