I was scouring the web looking for information on NetFlow v9 the other day and came across this document on NetFlow. I thought these slides on ‘show ip cache flow’ and ‘show ip cache verbose flow’ were interesting. If you are trouble shooting with a customer, they can be pretty useful. Read more »
Michael Patterson
At Plixer International’s Technical Support desk we often take calls in support of our NetFlow and sFlow analysis tool that deal with disk space and disk performance issues. In the world of NetFlow and sFlow collector appliances, the name of the game is to have sufficient available disk space and minimize disk I/O. Read more »
I don’t remember where we saw it, but there was a report that stated there were 102 unique vendors that released a 
NetFlow tool in 2008.
I don’t know how accurate that is, but I can definitely confirm that if you go to Google.com and search the key word NetFlow, you’re going to get a LONGGGGGGGG list.
So with a plethora of options and little time to evaluate, what does Scrutinizer offer that might make it worth…scrutinizing? (Sorry, couldn’t help it)
Here’s five compelling reasons to take a look at my product:
Just about all NetFlow Analyzers get the interfaces names of the routers and switches using SNMP. Another reason why SNMP vs. NetFlow is really a no contest. Anyway, we can get the names of interfaces using NetFlow via something called NetFlow option templates.
Michael PattersonBandwidth monitoring hasn’t been as big a concern for as long as some of us might think. Ethernet was founded in 1973 by Bob Metcalfe and David Boggs. Read more »
Michael PattersonYes, you can use NetFlow to monitor traffic and bandwidth usage on an ASA.
One of the primary uses for NetFlow on a Cisco ASA is as a transport protocol for security events. But if you are using the right NetFlow Analysis tool, you can also analyze traffic using NetFlow sent from the Cisco ASA.
This is really important as I have seen many companies that have remote sites that are connected with a Cisco ASA, but had no devices behind the ASA’s that supported NetFlow. This meant that they couldn’t leverage NetFlow to analyze traffic.
Hello everybody! My name is Paul Dube and I have recently graduated from the University of Maine in Orono with a degree in Computer Science and joined the support team here at Plixer International. Over the course of the past few weeks I’ve been trying to learn everything there is to know about Scrutinizer, NetFlow, sFlow and network traffic analysis. During this process I’ve come across a lot of great resources that I would like to consolidate into one place to help you get started.
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Most people collecting NetFlow use it in a very traditional fashion (i.e. NetFlow v5 with ingress flows). Ingress flow means that only inbound (i.e. received) traffic is collected and exported in NetFlow datagrams. This may sound like you won’t know what is going ‘out’ an interface, but have no fear. There is any easy way to calculate outbound traffic using ingress NetFlow.
Above, out bound utilization on interface 1 is determined by looking at the flows from interfaces 2,3 & 4 that are destined for interface 1. Since an ingress flow contains the source and destination interface (i.e. port of the router). Out bound traffic is determined by using ingress flows from the other interfaces. For this reason, it is important to enable NetFlow on all interfaces of the switch or router. This trick is common practice in all NetFlow reporting tools. But, what about NetFlow v9 and its support for ‘Egress’ NetFlow (i.e. traffic going out an interface)?
When was the last time you used a Network General Sniffer™? Do you remember the Matrix view? Read more »
Michael Patterson
If you put a price tag on network monitoring for your organization, what would it be? $10,000? $100,000? $1,000,000?
And what needs to be included in that price? Staff to support the network? Network Monitoring hardware and software? Office space to house the staff and equipment?
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