System requirements for a NetFlow collector are a lot higher than the average program. While I am still the “new guy” in support I am already seeing some trends here at Plixer. The majority of cases I have been working with involve servers that seem to run slow despite being on top of the line equipment. Nearly every time this issue comes up it is caused by an improper hard disk configuration.

One of the most overlooked NetFlow Collector System Requirements that write heavy database servers have is disk IOPS (Input/output Operations per Second). You have to remember that a spinning disk is very limited on how many writes it can make at any given time, and if the collector cannot write to the disk fast enough it can cause a lot of problems.  This has been the root cause of a lot of slow NetFlow collectors.

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Network Performance Analysis in a virtualized environment like VMware can be a tricky beast as often times everything is encapsulated using GRE tunnels between virtual switches.  What can we do? As luck would have it, most virtual switches support Netflow. Yes, vSphere NetFlow support is available. Read more »

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Are you looking for Catalyst 3750 NetFlow Support?  Unless you own the X model (i.e. Catalyst 3750X) you will need to span a port to an nBox, a SonicWALL in bridge mode or similar.  The Catalyst 3750X NetFlow support is only available if you have invested in the 3KX module.  Without the 3KX, this switch only supports Smart Logging and Telemetry Flexible NetFlow exports.

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Monitoring internet capable devices are becoming more necessary. It seems like every device that is released to the market supports internet connectivity. I have seen a dramatic increase in the amount of internet devices that university campuses have to monitor over the last few years. With all of these devices sprouting up, NetFlow monitoring is becoming much more essential for these educational institutions. Read more »

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Monitoring your employees use of the internet is getting easier everyday. NetFlow makes it very easy to gain insight to your network bandwidth, especially this time of the year. Thanksgiving is right around the corner and that means Black Friday and Cyber Monday are also close at hand. Many of our customers are concerned about Black Friday Internet Traffic and how it will impact their ecommerce efforts.  Our NetFlow and IPFIX reporting tool ships with several reports that can easily report on ecommerce traffic.  Even Cyber Monday internet traffic can be monitored the same way any company goes about monitoring corporate bandwidth.

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Did you know that you can find quality of service (QoS) information in NetFlow? Knowing what quality of service your crucial network traffic gets can either make or break an efficient infrastructure. Due to its importance, certain traffic may be given a higher priority. Crucial business applications, for example, need higher priority than normal traffic, while social networks can receive low priority. Is there a way to easily find this information? Absolutely! Read more »

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I have had many customers ask me, “What are the algorithms in Flow Analytics and what do they do?” Excellent question. That is exactly what I will be covering in this second installment of my extensive series on Flow Analytics. In part one I covered how to enable Flow Analytics and properly configure it to your liking.

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What is Flow Analytics™ ?

Flow Analytics™ is a built-in module that a NetFlow analyzing tool uses to perform network behavior analysis. Flow Analytics™ can trigger alarms for such behaviors as worms, network scanning, and known compromised internet hosts. It can alarm you if any DoS attacks are happening. Once that happens it can identify repeat offenders and create a Unique Identifier (UI) to manage traffic counts. Flow Analytics™ can also identify your top applications, conversations, protocols, etc across dozens of routers and switches.

Flow Analytics™ allows you to store data for more than 24 hours. You can choose to save an infinite amount of Net Flow data history at every interval. So now you can go back and identify a problem that occurred 2 weeks ago on your network. Flow Analytics™ also allows for automated DNS resolution to help you quickly identify culprits on your network.

What makes Flow Analytics™ incredibly amazing is the ability to look at the NetFlow from multiple routers and switches simultaneously every 5 minutes. Potentially, you can configure hundreds of devices for each algorithm in Flow Analytics™. In this blog I will show you how to set up Flow Analytics™ and how to start configuring it. Read more »

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Since NetFlow is template-based, how does a collector know one template from another? The answer is simple, Intelligent Template Recognition ™. In short, a collector receives flows with packets and uses templates to decode the information in the packets. With Intelligent Template Recognition ™ it automatically knows how to name the templates. But how does the collector know how to name the template?

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A NetFlow Collector allows you to monitor Cisco’s Telepresence technology. This ability is very important considering remote employees are becoming more prevalent in today’s modern IT world. The real question is: how do you monitor Cisco Telepresence traffic with NetFlow? First let’s take a look at:  what is Cisco Telepresence?

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