The Cisco ASA is a great tool for Cyber Threat Defense. In part one of this blog I described the 3 components of Cisco’s threat defense solution. In this half I will be showing you some more benefits of the solution, and how it can be used in correlation with other technologies to give you end to end visibility in your network.

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Although the Cisco ASA NetFlow exports have had some problems in the past, Cisco was the first vendor to export flows from a firewall so a few issues out of the gate are almost expected.  Despite a few enigmas, it was still great to have and certainly better than nothing. In order to optimize the network for speed and reliability, IT professionals are always looking for more visibility into traffic. Therefore more information exported via NetFlow is always better. Read more »

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Is your engineering team trying to decide if you should be exporting NetFlow or IPFIX? This is the area of the technology where many first time vendors make mistakes. Implementing NetFlow or IPFIX is not difficult. But when programmers rely solely on RFCs as an implementation resource, the result is usually an export that many flow reporting vendors won’t support.  For this reason, this blog is largely dedicated to engineers who either want to export these technologies correctly or who need to troubleshoot what is wrong with an export they have been asked to look at.

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

In this blog I’ll show you how to use Cisco ASA NSEL (aka Cisco ASA NetFlow) reporting to monitor your Cisco ASA firewall ACLs. With the addition of our Cisco Advanced Reporting module you can run many useful NetFlow reports — Network Performance Monitoring (Medianet), Performance Routing, Network Based Application Recognition (NBAR) — but today we’re going to focus on Cisco ASA NSEL Access Control List (ACL) reports.

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

Advanced NetFlow Training™ is coming to a city near you!  Our Washington, DC class on August 13 is nearly FULL with only 2 seats left.  Check out this crazy agenda covering all of the new NetFlow and IPFIX exports:

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Join the NetFlow Developments group on LinkedIn.

Finally, Cisco ASA NSEL details from a best at NetFlow reporting solution. NSEL allows for reporting on the non-traditional elements such as username, NAT, ACLs, etc. If you have not worked with technology before you may be pondering where all of this information comes from, and what it means. Today I will help clarify this for you by comparing Cisco’s event ID’s to syslogs. Read more »

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

Are you thinking about migrating to Flexible NetFlow (aka FnF)?   If you are, you are probably aware that FnF brings the following to NetFlow:

• NetFlow NBAR for application recognition
• Performance Monitoring “Cisco Medianet”
• Layer 2 information
• Export to unlimited collectors
• Much more…..

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

NetFlow has come a long way in the last few years.  For example, here’s a list of some new information that can now be monitored and filtered on by exporting NetFlow or IPFIX packets from your routers, switches, and firewalls.

•    Medianet
•    Host/Application Latency
•    VoIP with Caller ID
•    Configuring Cisco ASA NetFlow Exports
•    NBAR
•    URLs
•    Mac Address and VLAN

Now that’s a whole lot of information that you can get from your NetFlow Analyzer!

So what is all this new information?

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Configuring Flexible NetFlow NBAR has been discussed in our blogs before, but it’s still such a hot topic, I thought it warranted more coverage.

With NetFlow v9 Flexible NetFlow support, configuring the export of NBAR information to your NetFlow collector is simple to do by following these four steps.
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Sign up for Advanced NetFlow Training™ coming to a city near you!

At the support desk we often help customers set up configurations to enable NetFlow and sFlow on a number of different device types. The device types always seem to come in waves, or what I call, “the flavor of the week.” Last week I set up a number of Cisco ASA firewalls. This week I have been setting up a bunch of Cisco 6500 Catalyst Series Switches.

Often customers initially set these Cisco switches up with the traditional NetFlow commands and then see traffic under reported when looking at details from our NetFlow reporting tool. Read more »