Using Cisco Application Visibility and Control (AVC), network administrators can manage network application performance by setting up a wireless policy to prioritize, control, and bring visibility to the BYOD applications traversing their network.

There are many challenges IT managers face on a daily basis. As the number of user devices and the business, personal and collaborative applications continue to grow, these challenges only make the job of an IT manager harder.

Today’s networks support a mixed use of guests, employees and vendors. Without classifying and prioritizing applications on the network, employees risk losing productivity and response time to critical applications that they use.

Imagine what goes through the mind of an IT administrator who is responsible for getting a handle on device and application growth and usage on their network:

• Is a guest downloading movies using Bit-Torrent – in other words, stealing valuable airtime away from my mission-critical applications?
• What are my top users and applications?
• Can I prioritize business-class applications and de-prioritize the applications such as Netflix?
• Do I need more Access Points?

So how is Cisco AVC going to help on your wireless network access points?
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Scott Robertson
Sr. Solutions Engineer

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In Part 5 of the NetFlow v9 overview series, I will be talking about NetFlow v9 Options Templates, following up on Scott’s installment, part 4, which addressed what a NetFlow Data Flowset is.

What is an Options template?

It is a special type of template record used to communicate the format of data related to the NetFlow process.

Combine the Options template with an Options data record to provide information about the NetFlow process itself.  For example, the options template can contain applications tables with application tags, names and descriptions; or interface index tables to provide interface descriptions via NetFlow.

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Joanne Ghidoni
Sr. Solutions Engineer

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Has your network traffic monitoring solution provided you with a 2500% ROI? Any savvy IT professional knows it’s important to understand the return on investment when choosing to adopt a network performance monitoring tool. On March 14th,  Plixer will host a webcast with EMA Research Director, Jim Frey who will discuss how the average companies and institutions investing in Scrutinizer for Network Threat Detection and Traffic Analysis, realize nearly 2500% ROI. Read more »

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In Part 4 of our NetFlow Overview series, I will be discussing the NetFlow Data Flowset.  In Part 3 Joanne discussed the NetFlow Packet Template FlowSet and what is contained within. The templates tell the collector what information is being exported by the device. The Data FlowSet records contain values which correspond exactly to the definitions in the corresponding template. Without the template information the collector would just throw the records away.

Early NetFlow versions all have fixed formats which cannot be changed or added to. So no new or optional information can be exported by these formats (eg, these can’t export IPv6 or any new metrics such as jitter and packet loss or application definitions).  In NetFlow version 9 and IPFIX the template mechanism is flexible and expandable: the exporter simply sends a template containing the new fields, which tells the collector exactly what information the device will be exporting.

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Scott Robertson
Sr. Solutions Engineer

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Last week, Joanne started a series of blogs aimed at providing an overview of some NetFlow basics. I am going to continue this series and take a look at what can be found in the NetFlow Packet header.

Built by a device (for example, a router) with NetFlow services enabled, the NetFlow export packet is addressed to a NetFlow collector. The collector processes the packet and stores the information found in the IP flow records.

The NetFlow record format consists of a packet header followed by at least one or more template or data FlowSets.

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Scott Robertson
Sr. Solutions Engineer

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Did you know that using an advanced network reporting solution you can log NAT and firewall events from a Cisco ASR router to a flow collector, and report on this data using NetFlow v9?

I’ve been working with a service provider that deploys ASR1006 routers at his ISP’s internet Edge.  They use private IP addressing which is NATed at the internet edge network.  This allows scaling of IP addressing such that if they ever have more subscribers than available public IP address space they are not limited.  The problem that this presents is that his country has regulations where government authorities ask that ISPs identify a subscriber based on IP address and time provided by authorities to the ISP. So he needed some reporting that would provide this visibility. Read more »

Scott Robertson
Sr. Solutions Engineer

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Microsoft email reporting solutions are an important proactive responsibility that is often not addressed in many companies.

Who are the top email senders and receivers?
What are the top domains sending or receiving emails?
What are the top email subjects and who is involved with these emails?

The answers to these questions can be found in Mailinizer.

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Scott Robertson
Sr. Solutions Engineer

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We are excited to announce Scrutinizer v10 – our network traffic monitor with several new features.  A few of which are listed below.

• New Mapping: Multiple connections from the same device, animated links (network ants), dependencies and a newer look and feel. Someone else will blog on these new maps as there is a lot to talk about with this new feature.

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Matt

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Yes, you heard it right! Cisco has added support for the sFlow standard in the latest NX-OS 5.0(3)U4(1) release for Nexus 3000 Series switches.

The Nexus 3000 series are the first Cisco switches to include hardware support for sFlow, offering scalable wire-speed monitoring of all traffic flowing throughout entire networks of Nexus 3000 series switches.

Since the Nexus 3000 series switches are the first Cisco products with sFlow, many Cisco network administrators experienced with using Cisco’s NetFlow technology for monitoring TCP/IP traffic may likely be unfamiliar with sFlow technology.

Based on the name, you might think that sFlow is just another version of Cisco NetFlow.

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Scott Robertson
Sr. Solutions Engineer

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We figured out how to report on packet length with NetFlow.  All you have to do is enter “match ipv4 length total” in the flow record of the Flexible NetFlow Configuration .  This entry will export the element ipTotalLength   whereby the NetFlow and IPFIX reporting  tool can provide reports that look like this:

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