The other day I took an interesting call from a customer who was concerned because he was suddenly seeing his flows per second count almost double. He had just upgraded his Scrutinizer NetFlow and sFlow traffic analysis application to the latest version and he thought that maybe something had changed to cause this to happen.

I assured him that nothing in the Scrutinizer upgrade would have caused him to see his flow count increase. And after talking with him, I learned that he had also just upgraded the IOS on his routers.

Were we looking at some kind of a ”perfect storm“ scenario?

Of course not!

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Recently Mark Leary, wrote a blog about the “Top Ten IOS Services You Should Be Using Now!” In the blog he talks about some of the key high-value IOS services that can go unnoticed and unused by network operators.

Plixer International can help you put a number of these services to work for you by providing the best network analysis and reporting tools available on the market today.

We have talked for a long time about the benefits of using Cisco IPSLA as a proactive method of reliably measuring network performance. Raul Duran wrote a series of blogs talking about the use of IPSLA operations, and believes that IPSLA should be a part of every Network Administrator’s toolbox. Using our SNMP Performance and Trending tool, data can be retrieved and trended, enabling users to graph performance over time.

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A common occurrence and cause for data loss in Scrutinizer prior to version 7 has been crashed database tables.  It has also been the subject of many calls to our technical support group. Due to the large amount of NetFlow data received by NetFlow collectors, corrupted database tables can cause a large amount of data loss in a short period of time.

To minimize data loss and support time required to repair the corrupted database tables, in version 7 of our NetFlow and sFlow analyzer, we have introduced the ‘self-healing’ database.

A MySQL database check and repair is run on a regularly scheduled basis, once an hour.  If the database check finds any corrupted database tables, it will attempt the repair.  If it is unable to repair, an alarm will be generated to Scrutinizer to alert you of the corrupted table.
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You have heard of all the benefits gained by using Scrutinizer v7 as your NetFlow analysis tool. You decide that you are going to make the move to enable Netflow on your Cisco 4500 Series Switch. Do you need a NetFlow Services Card to do so?

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