Why do you want to know what is going on in the traffic flow of a network?

What’s the point?

Why doesn’t utilization alone cut it?

Network Administrators don’t typically have a lot of time on a day-to-day basis. There is always some fire to fight, some network or user issue that comes up. Most times your juggling more than one issue at a time. So you find yourself spending most of your time trying to keep the network running and the users happy.

A Network Administrator’s abilities are only as good as his awareness of what happens on his network.

Monitoring and maintaining your network traffic and bandwidth utilization used to be an overlooked aspect of your job. But evolution of technology has changed the makeup of networks everywhere and has forced network managers to include Flow analysis and monitoring in their network management strategies.

Network Flow Analysis is the art of studying the traffic on a computer network. It is the  industry-standard method of collecting and recording network traffic. Flow analysis lets you see what types of traffic passed between hosts, without having to reproduce the problem.

Read more »

Just the other day, Brad Reese from Network World wrote a nice blog reflecting on the recent announcement of H.P. acquiring 3Com.

With a huge announcement like this, naturally there are a lot of reactions and opinions. This kind of move may impact a lot of people and their current network strategies.

But coming from a NetFlow, sFlow and Netstream vendor perspective, I think this could be good news.

Read more »