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

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Paul Dube
Technical Support
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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:

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Michael Patterson
Scrutinizer Product Manager

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.

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Jon Mills
Marketing & Public Relations Manager
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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.  Explaining this issue became exhausting so we posted a nProbe FAQ on it.

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.

Michael Patterson
Scrutinizer Product Manager