Did you know that you can find quality of service (QoS) information in NetFlow? Knowing what quality of service your crucial network traffic gets can either make or break an efficient infrastructure. Due to its importance, certain traffic may be given a higher priority. Crucial business applications, for example, need higher priority than normal traffic, while social networks can receive low priority. Is there a way to easily find this information? Absolutely! Read more »

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In this day of companies downsizing and more employees working from home to cut office space costs, voice and video traffic over the internet is becoming more prevalent and also critical that it the quality is reliable.

We have several employees who work out of their homes and in an effort to maintain acceptable voice quality, we have configured QoS on their routers.

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Intermittent jitter issues with voice and video can be one of the more challenging IT issues to troubleshoot. Since traditional NetFlow  reporting does not include latency information, we are somewhat limited in NetFlow Analysis. None the less, we have to work with what we got! 

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Reporting on QoS using NetFlow is a fairly rudimentary report for even the most basic NetFlow reporting tools.  Although the name of this report differs from vendor to vendor, we are all talking about the same 8 bit ToS field of an IP datagram.  Sometimes mistakenly referred to as DSCP, this 1 byte value is used in an effort to help ensure end to end QoS flow for select business applications. Read more »

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Guys like Stephen Covey keep me inspired.  Have you read his book “Seven Habits of Highly Effective People“.  I thought it was great.  It lead me to believe that it was high time someone blogged about what sets NetFlow and sFlow reporting tools apart: Read more »

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This is part 4 of an 4-part series (so far 4 parts) on the ToS field (i.e. Differentiated Services Field) of IP frames. I finally get into how all this relates to NetFlow in 2009.  Make sure you have already read Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3 of this blog.

ToS and DSCP part 4
At the end of Part 3 of this blog series I digressed very briefly on how CBQoS can be used to modify DSCP values on packets which come into the router.  In other words, VoIP traffic that comes in on ports 4569 and 5060 could enter a router with one DSCP value 0×00 and leave with a completely different one e.g. 0xEF (i.e. 11101111).    Read more »

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SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA: Nortel has saved around $12 million in the last one year as a result of implementing unified communications (UC) in the organization. This often means voice, video and data all done remotely using a typical laptop.

My experience with UC
Two weekends ago I was up at Lake Winnipesaukee in New Hampshire and my cell phone reception was horrible. I needed to call the office and I didn’t want to use the phone in the hotel room to run up my personal charges and go through the hassle of submitting a reimbursement at the office. I experienced UC by launching my soft phone on my PC and making a phone call after checking my email. Read more »

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This is part 3 of a series on the ToS field (i.e. Differentiated Services Field) of IP frames. I’m getting closer to how it relates to NetFlow and sFlow.  Make sure you have already read Part 1 and Part 2 of this blog.

ToS part 3
In this blog I copy largely from RFC 2474, which was written in 1998. I discuss how 6 bits of the 8-bit ToS is now the Differentiated Services Code Point. See the screen capture below from my first blog. This is where we are today however, many of us still refer to this field as ToS (i.e. type of service). Sometimes it is called the Differentiated Services Field (DSF) but, not as often.  Read more »

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I know that I already blogged about being back from SharkFest 2009. I wanted to write about my favorite keynote speaker, Dr. Lawrence Roberts. He was one of the founders of the Internet and TCP/IP.

Overview of Internet growth
During his presentation he said that 80% of Internet traffic is caused by 5% of the people and most of the traffic created by this 5% is P2P.  He went on to point out that in 2008 22% of the population was online.  By 2018 it will be at 99%.

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We’ve arrived at the final part of this blog series outlining some of the great Cisco NetFlow analysis improvements that will be found in Scrutinizer 7.0. With features like the ones we’re putting out in this new version, Scrutinizer is easily one of the best values in the flow-analysis market. Let’s continue outlining some more features of Scrutinizer 7.

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