As a member of the NetFlow Knights team, I am pleased to announce Plixer’s first NetFlow and IPFIX technical book: Unleashing the Power of NetFlow & IPFIX written by Plixer’s own Michael Patterson. This book explores how flow technologies are impacting businesses and improving the way IT organizations around the world are able to manage vast amounts of information with ease, efficiency and with more knowledge into the transactions utilizing the network infrastructure. Read more »

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As we approach the end of 2011, I’d like to take this time to recap some major advances in NetFlow & IPFIX reporting.

Several notable NetFlow developments for 2011 from Cisco Networks are:

• Medianet Network Performance Monitoring
• Cisco TrustSec (CTS) NetFlow support
• Cisco Smart Logging and Telemetry (SLT)

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Do you remember exactly what you were doing July 26th? If you were at Plixer’s FlowFest 2011 you were eating fresh Maine lobster after a successful day of Advanced NetFlow Training™!

What’s that you say? You were cleaning the garage instead? If you weren’t able to attend this year, no worries, there’s always next year! FlowFest is a premiere NetFlow training event, hosted annually in the beautiful coastal town of Wells, Maine. (Thanks to everyone for the pictures!)

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For those of you interested in setting up Cisco Performance reporting via Flexible NetFlow to gain latency insight into your Medianet (E.g. VoIP, Video, etc.), I’ll provide the Flexible NetFlow configuration instructions in this post.

This will allow the Cisco router to export additional characteristics about each flow:

• Jitter: the variation in delay viewed at a particular point compared with the source. Ideally, this value shouldn’t go above 5ms.
• Packet loss: loss of datagrams in the connection
• Transport Event Packet Loss: indicates a loss of an unknown number of a sequential run of packets.
• Round Trip Time: calculated via measuring the time delta between the SYN and the ACK of the TCP flags.

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

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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On the plane ride back from Cisco Live 2009 I thought about John Chambers (CEO of Cisco) and thought about his views on video media and that it will become an important part of the traffic on our networks.

I think he is right. Look how much we use YouTube.com to post our NetFlow training videos on how to use our software. How many of you use Skype to call family and friends? It’s awesome and most of these tools are FREE!!!  Hence, it is becoming more and more popular.

And the more I thought about it, the more I kept coming back to Cisco NetFlow, sFlow and this little 1-byte field called ToS (type of service). I became so inspired that I thought I’d write a white paper that would dive into the guts of this often-ignored topic. After reading various RFCs, I decided that my white paper wouldn’t get read because this topic can be boring, but a blog, if written well, can be exciting!  So, I challenged myself to forget about the white paper and to blog about it. Here goes…part 1 of at least a 4-part blog.

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