System requirements for a NetFlow collector are a lot higher than the average program. While I am still the “new guy” in support I am already seeing some trends here at Plixer. The majority of cases I have been working with involve servers that seem to run slow despite being on top of the line equipment. Nearly every time this issue comes up it is caused by an improper hard disk configuration.

One of the most overlooked NetFlow Collector System Requirements that write heavy database servers have is disk IOPS (Input/output Operations per Second). You have to remember that a spinning disk is very limited on how many writes it can make at any given time, and if the collector cannot write to the disk fast enough it can cause a lot of problems.  This has been the root cause of a lot of slow NetFlow collectors.

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Network Performance Analysis in a virtualized environment like VMware can be a tricky beast as often times everything is encapsulated using GRE tunnels between virtual switches.  What can we do? As luck would have it, most virtual switches support Netflow. Yes, vSphere NetFlow support is available. Read more »

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Are you in need of a Cisco NetFlow collector for network traffic analysis? Do you have an overwhelming amount of traffic on your network, but no way to tell who is using all the bandwidth? You’ve come to the right place! Our NetFlow reporting tool has the most flexible reporting engine available, so you can always find the flows you’re looking for.

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In this blog I want to talk about enabling NetFlow on a VMware ESX. Netflow support has now been added to vSphere 5; by configuring your virtual switch to send NetFlow statistics to a netflow Analyzer you gain visibility into your virtual infrastructure. To be more specific, you will be able to monitor:

• VM to VM traffic on the same host
• VM to VM traffic on different hosts
• VM to devices outside the virtual environment.

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Are you looking to setup Smart Logging and Telemetry NetFlow (SLT) exports or to report on them? This blog covers how to enable SLT NetFlow exports.

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I’ve had many customers ask, “What is VoIP jitter and how does it apply to NetFlow?” so today we’re going to dive into this topic. If you’re a VoIP phone system administrator, I’m sure you’ve had those dreaded calls from your users yelling about poor call quality, so you check your bandwidth usage graphs, but you can’t find any network congestion. Now what?

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Today I am going to explain how to activate your Maipu router IPFIX.  You may ask, “Why would I want to export IPFIX?” Thats a great question, because you want to be able to monitor all the traffic passing through your Maipu router so you can report on it.

To review, IPFIX stands for ‘IP Flow Information Export’. Some companies like to rename their implementation of NetFlow and IPFIX but Maipu keeps it simple and simply calls it IPFIX. IPFIX is just like NetFlow v9 but with added support. IPFIX allows vendors to export unique vendor IDs so they can stick proprietary information in the flows and export anything they want.

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The Cisco Catalyst 4500E is one of the latest kids on the block, so the age old question in our world is, “How do you configure NetFlow on this?”
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In Part 1 I talked about how to configure your SonicWALL NetFlow / IPFIX exporting firewall to properly send NetFlow to a 3rd party NetFlow Reporting tool.  Now I want to share with you the information that you can report on with that 3^rd party NetFlow collector. All of this comes with SonicWALL using IPFIX, the proposed standard in NetFlow technology.

Example of reports on SonicWALL IPFIX exports:

• Application Conversations (App Conv)
• Application
• Intrusions
• Spyware
• URLs
• Users
• Viruses

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I recently learned that Cisco is planning to have integration with DPI (Deep Packet Inspection).  What does this mean to your NetFlow collector and NetFlow Analyzer?  More good stuff!

Seriously, it means more information on the applications on your network.  What good is a NetFlow Reporting tool that only tells you the application is ‘HTTP’ (i.e. port 80)?  Many applications today are using port 80 and a whole slew of others use random ports. This is a real problem for NetFlow monitoring tools because there often isn’t enough information in the traditional NetFlow v5 tuple to determine the actual application (e.g. skype, BitTorrent, H.323, GoToMeeting, etc.).  It has to be done by the hardware or software that exports the IPFIX or NetFlow information. Read more »