Sampling traffic in an effort to represent the overall traffic pattern in theory is a sound idea.  In fact, for the most part, I agree that statistically, sampling can be as accurate as rolling a dice 1296 times and expecting exactly 216 matches for each of the 6 possible outcomes.  Well, I doubt it.   When counting massive quantities of data and accuracy matters, we need an alternate solution to sampling but, what is it?

Read more »

Steve

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

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

Nagios is one of the more popular free network monitoring solutions that can be upgraded to a commercial version.  For years this community has depended on 3rd party NetFlow Analysis tools as a best of breed approach to a complete solution. Recently, Nick Scott at Nagios announced Nagios Network Analyzer which provides basic support for NetFlow v5, v7 and v9 however, it lacks support for all of the unique elements that can be exported by Flexible NetFlow and IPFIX.   What does this mean?

Read more »

Brian

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

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

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.

Read more »

Scott Robertson
Sr. Solutions Engineer

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

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

We’ve blogged about the differences between NetFlow and sFlow before but this debate continues to come up often enough and has been going on long enough that it needs to be put to rest once and for all. So let’s cut right to the chase:

Read more »

How to configure Vyatta NetFlow?  That is the question we will be answering in this blog. I thought you might need a short and concise Vyatta NetFlow configuration guide that goes straight to the point.

Configuring NetFlow on a Vyatta is fairly simple: Read more »

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

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

It is nice to see calls on Juniper IPFIX support start to roll in. The other day I had a customer call in who was seeing unexpected DSCP values in our netflow network traffic analyzer, many of them were “23456”. This raised the question whether somehow the traffic analysis tool was not deciphering AS numbers correctly or whether it was a Juniper IPFIX problem.

Read more »

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

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

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.

Read more »

Jimmy Wendler

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

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

Do you remember exactly what you were doing July 26th? If you were at Plixer’s FlowFest 2011 you were eating fresh Maine lobster after a successful day of Advanced NetFlow Training™!

What’s that you say? You were cleaning the garage instead? If you weren’t able to attend this year, no worries, there’s always next year! FlowFest is a premiere NetFlow training event, hosted annually in the beautiful coastal town of Wells, Maine. (Thanks to everyone for the pictures!)

Read more »

Matt

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

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

has been improved in some of the latest VC 6.x releases. I worked on a NetFlow reporting issue with a VC 6.0 user in the past trying to figure out why his NetFlow Analyzer was not showing the expected amount of traffic. We used Wireshark and found that a large number of flow packets were being exported without flow data, therefore were useless and discarded by the collector. Since he upgraded to VC 6.2, he was able to see all his traffic.Vyatta now supports MAC addresses, as seen in the image below! Read more »

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

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

Is there an sFlow solution that supports some sort of Latency export? Many products such as Cisco routers, SonicWALLs and the nBox are exporting latency information about flows in IPFIX or NetFlow.  Citrix NetFlow (or IPFIX) could be next to join the bandwagon. Where is sFlow’s latency solution?

Read more »

Michael Patterson
Founder and CEO

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

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