One of the most fun yet scariest parts of being an entrepreneur is making predictions.  If your forecast is correct, hopefully it will be good for your company.  If you are wrong, you hope no one notices.  In 2009 I posted a blog titled OMG, the Internet is overloaded! where I discussed application recognition and its importance in the role of prioritizing traffic.  In the post I stated “Due to the fact that many applications use the same ports, application recognition is no simple process (e.g. Skype ‘VoIP’ looks like BitTorrent ‘data’).  My guess is that accurate application awareness is a highly dynamic problem necessitating frequent updates.”  Today, several vendors now perform Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) to monitor a series of packets to identify layer 7 applications. Cisco Application Visibility and Control uses NBAR to serve just this purpose. Below I’ve listed a few companies that utilize DPI to identify layer 3 applications:

Read more »

For a free 30 day trial of Scrutinizer, Download Now!

Sign up for Advanced NetFlow Training™ coming to a city near you!

KENNEBUNK, ME — (Marketwired) — 04/11/13 – Plixer International, Inc., a leading provider of threat detection and network traffic monitoring solutions, today announced that CEO and Founder Michael Patterson will join Jameson Blandford, Technical Marketing Manager, Cisco Systems, for several complimentary webcasts regarding Cisco Wireless Application Visibility and Control(AVC) and traffic visibility. The live events are being held on Thursday April 25 at 10am (EDT) and 4pm (EDT), attendees may register at:https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/991078369. Read more »

For a free 30 day trial of Scrutinizer, Download Now!

Sign up for Advanced NetFlow Training™ coming to a city near you!

We have added Cisco Catalyst 3850 Netflow support to the current release of Scrutinizer, NetFlow and sFlow Analyzer. This switch is no Catalyst 3750 as it offers both wired and wireless as well as native Netflow support without a 3KX module. The switch can enable multi-level QoS based on granular information such as SSID, client, radio, application and fair share policies for wireless, while Scrutinizer performs network traffic monitoring on all of these parameters for details.

Read more »

Good news, Cisco Application Visibility and Control – AVC NetFlow support will be in the next release of our NetFlow collector.  We are one of the first vendors to announce support for these new NetFlow v9 exports that are configured using Flexible NetFlow.

Read more »

For a free 30 day trial of Scrutinizer, Download Now!

Sign up for Advanced NetFlow Training™ coming to a city near you!

The cutting edge Cisco 7600 Series is an edge router that delivers robust, high performance IP/MPLS features for service provider and enterprise WAN/MAN applications. There are some common Cisco 7600 NetFlow problems that you should be aware of when enabling Cisco 7600 NetFlow exports.

Read more »

For a free 30 day trial of Scrutinizer, Download Now!

Sign up for Advanced NetFlow Training™ coming to a city near you!

Plixer is pleased to announce a new weapon in the war against Internet threats: the all new Internet Threat Center (ITC). Based on hundreds of observation points deployed across the Internet, the ITC provides a near-realtime view of malicious actors across the globe. Plixer customers gain access to the ITC via regular updates to Internet host reputation data downloaded from the ITC to their Scrutinizer installations. NetFlow data collected from routers and switches within their network is compared to ITC data to alert when ITC suspects are active within the customer’s network environment.

This blog provides an overview of the Internet Threat Center and a brief tour of its features…

Read more »

For a free 30 day trial of Scrutinizer, Download Now!

Sign up for Advanced NetFlow Training™ coming to a city near you!

Mike Patterson (Plixer CEO and Founder) and I have been long time colleagues in the arena of NetFlow analysis. Over the years we’ve both watched as NetFlow has matured and gained increasing popularity and I’ve always admired Mike and his team’s energy and steadfast devotion to NetFlow technology. Read more »

IT Security : NetFlow, the proposed standard for network traffic analysis (when SNMP & Port Utilization just won’t cut it), has made leaps and bounds in Internet Security during the past few years. In part one of a two part series, I’d like to demonstrate Read more »

For a free 30 day trial of Scrutinizer, Download Now!

Sign up for Advanced NetFlow Training™ coming to a city near you!

My engineering contact at Cisco told me that Flexible NetFlow Performance Monitoring is now available on several of the Cisco Catalyst switches.  It’s supported on the SUP2T and a host of other devices like 3750-X and 4500E.

Read more »

For a free 30 day trial of Scrutinizer, Download Now!

Sign up for Advanced NetFlow Training™ coming to a city near you!

Cisco Performance Routing isn’t your grandfather’s routing. Cisco Performance routing (PfR for short) considers a particular path’s traffic characteristics when determining the best path for the conversation. Imagine being able to use actual delay, packet loss, MOS, jitter and more to give your router a better idea of the traffic conditions. With that data it can make a smart decision on how to route the conversation traffic. Add to that the ability to report on this with something simple like Netflow and you have solution that sounds to good to be true. Well, it isn’t!

Read more »

For a free 30 day trial of Scrutinizer, Download Now!

Sign up for Advanced NetFlow Training™ coming to a city near you!

Join the NetFlow Developments group on LinkedIn.