Thanks to Jimmy D, our renowned International Sales Channel Manager, we have a proven solution for monitoring NetFlow traffic for home users.

A situation arose for Jim where his wife and daughter would be in Florida caring for his parents while he was still here in Maine. The geek that he is, he didn’t want distance to keep them apart.

So he decided to provide voice, video, and network monitoring while they were in Florida. To achieve this, he decided to set up a small embedded server rack in his parents’ Florida home. This would allow for VoIP, Video, network traffic monitoring, and a web server.

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If you put a price tag on network monitoring for your organization, what would it be? $10,000? $100,000? $1,000,000?

And what needs to be included in that price? Staff to support the network? Network Monitoring hardware and software? Office space to house the staff and equipment?
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I was working with a call center that had a problem with high bandwidth usage and he wanted to know if Scrutinizer NetFlow & sFlow Analyzer would be able to help him out. They were seeing a lot of Facebook traffic on their network and wanted to be able to see if it was coming from the call center.

I let him know that with Scrutinizer, he could add a filter to show him all of the Facebook traffic on his network and limit it to the traffic from a certain IP range. He could also add a filter that would monitor his NetFlow data and alert if a certain amount of Facebook traffic originated from that IP range.
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Jim Dougherty aka "Jimmy D"
International Sales Channel Manager and
Netflow Evangelist for Plixer International!

Follow me on Twitter
http://twitter.com/jimmydnet
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Canadian lawmakers are debating network neutrality as it reviews industry comments submitted in response to its hearings last month on the subject. Why is this such a big deal? It is estimated that 80% of Internet traffic is caused by 5% of the population. This 5% is causing all the traffic using P2P applications such as BitTorrent which is optimized in many cases to hog bandwidth.

The Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commission is expected in November to issue guidelines for Canadian ISPs on how to manage Internet traffic and congestion. Cable companies and network management software providers issued their comments at the end of July for the CRTC to review. Read more »

Yet again, it’s raining here in Maine. I think it has been raining for four days straight and now I’m beginning to get a little antsy to see some sunshine.

Usually, I don’t watch the Weather Channel. I just take every day as it comes and adapt to the weather. If I wake up and it’s rainy and cold, I wear something warmer. If it’s bright and sunny, I wear a t-shirt.
I’m simple that way.

But when we have a run in weather like this, I ask myself: “When is this going to end?!?”
That’s when I break out of my normal habit and check the forecast for the next couple days. I must admit, there is a sense of peace knowing that the rain SHOULD end by tomorrow night.

Much like monitoring the weather, you can use SNMP to monitor your daily, weekly or even monthly traffic statistics to help you project what tomorrow may bring.

Notice the Port Utilization graph shown above: Not only does it provide statistics based on current data collected, it also estimates future projections based on your current trend using those strike lines.

With limiting budgets, it’s more difficult to rationalize spending on a new DS3 circuit for the company. However, network performance monitoring applications, such as Denika, make life easy by forecasting network growth, so that you can see a problem before it ever begins.

Think about this: Would you feel better knowing that tomorrow was always going to be a bright and sunny day?

-Nate

Remote employees are becoming more popular in almost every industry today.  And why not?  Remote sales people can prospect for customers in a geographical area that is too far from businesses.  Remote employees can dramatically lower facilities costs too.  It’s not for everyone though.  Some great employees can be easily distracted and produce less.  Others can lose the structure of a work day and start working many more hours causing burn out.  So how would you know if working from home is really a good fit for an employee? 

Scrutinizer would not only tell you a lot about an employees work habits, but it can also tell you a lot about how much it costs the company in terms of bandwidth.

We don’t have many remote employees, but we do have some.  I decided to trend myself one day while working from home.  I was surprised to see how much more bandwidth was consumed by VoIP in comparison to everything else.  I can also see how my traffic impacted the inbound pipe.  In this case the extra bandwidth consumption wasn’t too much of a big deal, but 20 more remote employees may put too much of a load on this specific interface. 

I can drill in to any of the protocols listed above to see specifics on when I started working and which internal resources I was using.

I think overall the success of a remote employee really depends on the individual and whether they have the discipline to do their job, and let it go once the day is done. 

In my case I wanted to see what was happening when the other person on the line said I was breaking up.  After setting up QoS on my home router and doing everything else that I could, it just comes down to me having a slower than desired upload speed.  So if I want to work from home, I better get some faster internet service.

Raul J Duran

First it was YouTube, now it’s traffic from Facebook and Twitter that network managers are having to grapple with on their corporate nets. Even if you don’t participate on those sites yourself, you are bound to see your users accessing those places at some point. So what’s your company policy for those sites? Are you allowing them or blocking access because they – especially YouTube and other video broadcast sites – take up too much valuable bandwidth?

If the company policy is to block those sites your company could be losing out on using a valuable tool with which to communicate with your existing and potential customers. And for corporate collaboration, internal microblogging services such as Yammer, which focuses on the business market, is invaluable for getting groups updated without having to remember or type each member’s e-mail address.

For external communications, more and more organizations are using networks like Facebook to build community with their customers. If you’re a Facebook user, you can friend giants such as Ford Motor Company and Cisco and network with their friends. And for your career management LinkedIn is a great way to find contacts at old, existing and potential new employers.

However, such social networks aren’t without their risks. Analysts at Nemertes Research advise companies to “pro-actively develop and enforce policies for employee use of public social networking sites that enables legitimate business use while minimizing risk to intellectual property.” Nemertes says more than 54% of respondents to its unified communications and collaboration research said their organizations uses, is planning to use, or is evaluating social networks for internal and external collaboration.

So it sounds like traffic and bandwidth management is going to be key as organizations drive up the use of social networks. And that’s where Scrutinizer comes in handy with its ability to identify bandwith-hogging apps and more.

* If you’re on Twitter, you can follow your Plixer friends Michael Patterson, Scrutinizer product manager, and Tom Pore, Plixer Field Engineer, Marketing Executive, and Network Administrator.

Denika is a performance trend application that works with Microsoft Windows. It is used to track and monitor bandwidth trends. Denika can provide you with real-time information regarding your network’s bandwidth usage plus display historical trends as well, allowing you to compare current and historical bandwidth use. While the most common use of Denika is to monitor bandwidth, it can also be used to record CPU trends, memory usa, hard drive space use, and several other functions, including monitoring scripts associated with database activity.

Denika is available in two different versions: a free version and a commercial version. The free version is available for use by any company that is looking to record its bandwidth trends. The company needs to support unlimited devices and reports. Once set up and running, Denika can record data for an entire year, and data can be saved as often as every five minutes. You can view reports per day, per week, per month, or take a look at your data usage for an entire year. Denika can easily and effortlessly integrate with many different network mapping tools, including InterMapper and WhatsUp.

The commercial version of Denika has a few more versions, although it does require a subscription fee to use. It allows you to set maximum and minimum values for all reports at once, rather than on a report by report basis as you must do in the free version. The commercial version also includes graphs that update in real-time and several other report viewing options.