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?
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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.
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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’.

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Jon Mills
Marketing & Public Relations Manager
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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.

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Paul Dube
Technical Support
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With the release of the Scrutinizer v7.3.1 updates, we have made available the ability to link back to devices in Scrutinizer from 3rd party applications such as Zenoss, WhatsUp Gold, and InterMapper, among others.
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One of the challenges that we sometimes face when integrating 3rd party applications within our NetFlow analysis tool is that they work until the 3rd party vendor decides to change something…

With that in mind, I wanted to let our customer base know that as of a couple days ago, Google made some changes to the way that they handle API keys. More specifically, any geocoding requests that are made from 3rd party vendors are required to pass an API key.

What does that mean for us?

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Expanding your network management options just got more affordable!

Through the Zenoss & Plixer partnership, the Scrutinizer ZenPack for integrating Scrutinizer NetFlow & sFlow Analyzer is now available.

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InterMapper by Dartware, Network Monitoring software, can quickly and easily integrate with Scrutinizer NetFlow & sFlow Analyzer. InterMapper even has a free version for up to 5 devices.  You can also add Scrutinizer icons in InterMapper and link from your flow exporting devices in Scrutinizer to InterMapper.

With the easy to follow, step-by-step instructions, you can add Scrutinizer as a Helper Application in InterMapper, allowing you to Launch NetFlow reports directly from InterMapper.

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If you use both our Scrutinizer NetFlow Analyzer and Denika Performance Trender tools to help meet your network management goals, you can integrate some of the Denika functionality into Scrutinizer.

This integration can include a link directly from the Status page of Scrutinizer to the Denika reports for a device. You can also use Denika reports in Scrutinizer maps.

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Are you looking for an inexpensive solution to gain visibility on your network? Traffic-Flow is a feature available on RouterOS by MikroTik. Traffic-Flow is comparable to Cisco’s NetFlow technology, providing statistical information about packets passing through the router. Traffic-Flow supports NetFlow formats: v1 (not recommend) , v5 (BGP, AS, and flow sequence support), and v9 (extend-able field and record type support); therefore, most NetFlow collectors, including Scrutinizer and similar, will listen for these flows.

RouterOS can be purchased by itself to run on a PC with two network interfaces, or you can purchase a RouterBoard, as I did, which will come with RouterOS loaded. You can run RouterOS in transparent bridge mode or as a router. If you run in bridge mode, all traffic exported will show as coming through one interface (the pass-through bridge), whereas, if run in router mode, you will get the different source and destination interface indexes and descriptions.

I bought the RB433AH and configured it to send flows to a Scrutinizer demo box. I have configured our RouterBoard as a bridge exporting Traffic-Flow v5 and placed this in-line between our firewall and core switch. As you can see in the screen capture below, the bridge information allows me to see traffic to and from our network. We are looking at the top 10 conversations for the last 5 minutes.

If you are currently running a network with devices that don’t support Cisco NetFlow, a RouterBoard for $145 is an inexpensive solution to give you the visibility you’ve been looking for.

-Tom Pore
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