IT professionals have been looking for better ways to monitor and store firewall logs for years. Properly handled, firewall events can give insight into APTs, DoS attacks, firewall rule planning and misconfigurations, policy violations, and much more. To date, Syslog has been the go-to mechanism for access to firewall log info. It’s universally supported by the firewall community, easy to understand, and it’s quick to implement on both the firewall as well as the syslog analyzer.

Unfortunately syslog is resource intensive on both the firewall and the log analyzer. It’s largely unstructured, requires string pattern matching, and the exact format and fields vary from one firewall to the next. How often do you turn on full “Accept” and “Deny” logging for every rule? Sure you can and yes it’s valuable but the amount of syslog created is tremendous.

Enter NetFlow and IPFIX…

Read more »

Have you been looking for a Zenpack that would allow seamless integration of Zenoss and the NetFlow tool Scrutinizer? Well you have come to the right place! Today I will be showing you how to complete the configuration of this integration. Read more »

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

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

Not long ago, Rich Tehrani from TMCnet sat down to interview our very own Product Manager Michael Patterson to talk NetFlow, IPFIX and the recent influx of mobile devices on corporate networks around the world. Mike is a technology entrepreneur who has spent the last 15 years chasing his passion of designing and implementing high value products that help manage networks, large and small. His projects include Read more »

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 »

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

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

Since this topic has come up several times over the last few weeks, I’ve decided to blog about creating custom report templates in Denika, our MRTG Performance Trender.

The first request was for monitoring Sensatronics temperature probes.  And then today we received the following request on our forums:

“Are there any way to make denika support mibs of ZTE or Huawei? Can i edit the template by some way, or some other method is available?”

And the answer is Yes, you can create new device and report templates with Denika. For Sensatronics, ZTE, Huawei, and other vendors also.  If they support SNMP, we can monitor them.  All you need is the IP Address, OID string, and the SNMP Credential for the device.
Read more »

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

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

Uptime Software provides Mid-Enterprises with Deep, Affordable, and Easy-to-Use IT Systems Management. They chose to integrate Scrutinizer, Plixer’s NetFlow analyzer, into their Network Monitoring solution. Check out the list of monitoring abilities.

Read more »

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

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

You’re in the market for a NetFlow Traffic Analyzer.  What are the key features that you’re looking for?  What makes one NetFlow analyzer stand out from the rest?  Do you have a list of “must haves”?

Such as support for Flexible NetFlow, IPFIX reporting, portable network maps?  How about automated NetFlow configuration on your routers and switches?  Is customization of the web interface important to you?  Multiple language support critical?
Read more »

The question is, how do you integrate the network management application that you have been using forever and the NetFlow traffic monitoring application data that you have recently installed?  NetFlow collection, as we have all learned these last few years, provides more and more insight into not just how much network traffic you have, but what that traffic is.

So we need to be able to seamlessly move from one application to the other.  If your NetFlow traffic analyzer is Scrutinizer version 7, then the following information should be of great interest to you.
Read more »

We had a customer approach us the other day with an nprobe issue. Apparently, he could see the NetFlow v9 data in Flow View of Scrutinizer, but he couldn’t report on the data. How come?

He sent us a Wireshark packet capture and brought up Flow View. Flow View is a way to see the raw flows (inclusive of all columns) being exported by a device.

Anyway, in Flow View everything looked normal, but then one of our developers spotted the word ‘post’ in front of a couple of import column names. We (and Scrutinizer) expect to see ‘octetDeltaCount’ and instead, the customer had configured nProbe to kick out ‘postOctetDeltaCount’.

Read more »

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

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

Our development team has been working hard and we are pleased to announce the release of Plixer Tools 8.0.0. What’s Plixer Tools you ask? We’ve combined Denika, Logalot, WebNM, and Flowalyzer into a single installer to provide better integration with Scrutinizer.

Read more »

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

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