Continued from NetFlow Generators: Enabling NetFlow Without NetFlow Support (Part #1)…

Last week we covered NetFlow Generator basics including many of the more common deployment options. Now let’s take a look at some of the NetFlow generators available and what characteristics to look for in a best-of-breed NetFlow generator.

Read more »

For a free 30 day trial of Scrutinizer, Download Now!

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

The Catalyst 2950 / 2960 NetFlow Support is sought after because it is one of the most prolific switches produced by Cisco.  Sometimes it seems like every company we talk to has one and since we are a NetFlow and IPFIX company, we come across a lot of consumers who want to collect NetFlow from them. Customers are in luck.

Read more »

For a free 30 day trial of Scrutinizer, Download Now!

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

NetFlow probes allow for advanced traffic analysis in areas of your network that don’t have the required hardware to export NetFlow data. While I was on a support call with one of our customers they showed me a map of their NetFlow probe implementation and I was in awe with how many Windows NetFlow probes and Linux NetFlow probes that they’ve deployed on their network to allow for advanced NetFlow traffic analysis.

Read more »

For a free 30 day trial of Scrutinizer, Download Now!

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

Hello all, we’ve been getting a lot of questions lately on how to configure nProbe and what the recommended nProbe configurations are, so I’ve put together some sample nProbe configurations to help setup your Linux nProbe.

Read more »

For a free 30 day trial of Scrutinizer, Download Now!

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

I was talking with our newly appointed Pre-Sales Support Specialist, Scott, the other day when we realized that we don’t have a NetFlow Glossary blog, so I wanted to take this opportunity to consolidate some resources and highlight some of the key NetFlow terminology that we find ourselves talking about on a daily basis.

NetFlow Terminology:

Bidirectional Flows
Flexible NetFlow
Ingress vs. Egress
Interface 0
ip-flow timeout active 1
IPFIX
ip route-cache flow vs. ip flow ingress
NBAR
NetFlow Collector and Analyzer
NetFlow Exporters
NetFlow Options Templates
NetFlow Probe
NetFlow Replicator
NetFlow v5 vs. v9
NSEL
sFlow

Read more »

For a free 30 day trial of Scrutinizer, Download Now!

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

Is cloud computing right for your business?  Will it save your company money?  Gartner Inc.  predicts that by 2012, 80 percent of Fortune 1000 enterprises will pay for some cloud computing service, while 30 percent of them will pay for cloud computing infrastructure.  Inevitably your company will eventually consider cloud services for one or more of the business applications it depends on.  Ask yourself:

Read more »

For a free 30 day trial of Scrutinizer, Download Now!

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

Come see Plixer International (Booth #960) at Cisco Live at Mandalay Bay Resort in Las Vegas June 27 – July 1, 2010.

What a great opportunity to meet several of the Plixer Team members, including:

• MMM (Mix Master Mitch), our renowned NetFlow Rapper
• Michael Patterson, Product Manager
• Jon Mills, Marketing Manager
• Nathan Halverson, blogger extraordinaire!

3 NEW features will be highlighted with live demos of our NetFlow Analyzer.  Maybe we’ll show off our IPFIX and NetFlow Probe abilities?

Come see why our sFlow and NetFlow Collector are different from the rest for network traffic monitoring.

- Joanne

For those of you that missed Plixer’s recent series of webinars, aimed at getting the most out of NetFlow using their latest and greatest NetFlow and sFlow analyzer, there is still hope. A recording of the webinar has been made available online for your viewing pleasure. Just click the image below to watch this 40 minute presentation.

Michael Patterson, Scrutinizer Product Manager, covered a range of topics in this traffic monitoring centric presentation.

Read more »

For a free 30 day trial of Scrutinizer, Download Now!

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

Overview
Seems like everyday we have someone uninstall Scrutinizer because they didn’t realize their routers and switches don’t support NetFlow or sFlow.  About 3 years ago we released a software package called nProbeLive that was similar to nProbe.

nProbe can be installed on a computer which sits on a mirrored or spanned port of a switch.  Basically, it converts the packets seen into NetFlow v5, v9 or IP FIX.

Big Problem
A mirrored port may send in and out traffic ‘OUT’ the spanned port so the nProbe sees it all as ‘IN’ traffic.  What’s the problem? It will generally over state utilization on the interface and it is difficult to determine what was sent Vs. received.  Over coming this issue is done by making provisions in the configuration.

Wireshark or nProbe ?
NetFlow Analysis does not give nearly the insight as Packet Analysis however, it causes much less traffic.  If you need archiving of high level information (i.e who is talking with who and with what), use nProbe.  If you are trying to get juicy details like URLs, etc. use Wireshark.

Scrutinizer Vs. Wireshark
We look at Scrutinizer as being to NetFlow what Wireshark is to packet analysis.  The archiving capabilities of NetFlow and sFlow are much more efficient.  The details however, are left to packet analysis.

For a free 30 day trial of Scrutinizer, Download Now!

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