What a year so far!

You know the old saying “Time flies when you’re having fun”? Here at Plixer, our developers are so freakishly passionate about creating the NetFlow architecture of the future, the years seem to pass us by like a blur.

The hard work is really paying off! Not only were we the first company to receive Cisco certification within the Systems Management technology category but, we are proud to announce that last week we won the 2011 Golden Bridge Award for NetFlow innovations!These industry and peer awards from Golden Bridge are the world’s premier business recognition program. This award is a huge accomplishment for such a passionate group of employees. To top it all off, Cisco sent us Medianet T-Shirts!

With Cisco predicting by 2013 91% of all network traffic will be voice/video streams, we’ve been spending a significant amount of time focusing on the development of the many new Cisco Medianet performance monitoring reports. Scrutinizer v9.0 is just around the corner, it will be exciting to get feedback on all of the new reports we have built for Cisco Smart Logging and Telemetry, Cisco TrustSec, Performance Routing, Performance Monitoring and of course all of the new SonicWALL IPFIX support.

What is MediaNet?
Medianet is an intelligent end-to-end network that combines video technologies in the business, home and service provider networks. More than just higher bandwidth, it optimizes video and rich media traffic. Our solution was the first to report on the new metrics Cisco imbedded into Flexible NetFlow templates. Network traffic analysis with the advanced filtering in our NetFlow Management solution is further proof that our software provides the very best in NetFlow reporting. Read more »

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What do IPv6 Day and Y2K have in common? I’ll break it down for you real simple: a lot of stuff happened, but most of us never noticed. Now, let me explain in detail…

Internet Protocol Version 6 (IPV6) is the newest technology that has everyone stirring for solutions to problems that hadn’t yet been fully realized. Not until IPv6 day, that is. As digital consumers, we need our information to be retrieved faster than ever, and all connectivity is expected to be warp speed. The current IPv4 exhaustion crisis is eerily similar to Y2K in that the eventual outcome was expected to go two different ways: either nothing will happen or complete Armageddon will ensue. But there’s also a fundamental difference: we’re not nearly as worked up about IPv4 exhaustion as we were about Y2K ahead of the fact.

Each IPV4-to-IPV6 and IPV6-to-IPV4 conversion adds an extra “hop” and requires a large amount of computing power to process information about who you are trying to talk to, and who you are known by on the other end. The coexistence of both protocols seems to be consistent with a family traveling on vacation; precious vacation time is wasted by the family (IPv4) driving to the airport, then transferring to a plane (IPv6), in an overall attempt to save time in the air. In the fastest scenario possible, you wouldn’t want to use two means of transportation, instead opting to use your private plane in the back yard (IPv6).

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Today’s topic is Nagios, a network infrastructure monitoring software. Nagios can monitor anywhere from SNMP to internal system trending, but did you know that it could monitor NetFlow? Nagios cannot do this alone; it requires an additional 3rd party plugin. But with this NetFlow plugin, your Nagios is now transformed into a Nagios NetFlow Analysis tool. Now you can monitor NetFlow on your Cisco medianet or SonicWALL devices through your Nagios software. But wait, there’s more! Read more »

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You are an IT professional.  You know about NetFlow.  But do you need to know more?  Do you need to get a NetFlow solution in place?  Could you better serve your company with advanced knowledge of NetFlow from the industry leader in NetFlow collecting and reporting?  Do you want to get your hands on some fresh Maine lobster?

Then check out our upcoming FlowFest™ 2011: Advanced NetFlow Training, a 3-day conference to learn what is possible with NetFlow technology.  Read more »

Plixer International is heading to London for next week’s Cisco Live 2011 tradeshow.  While I am personally not attending (and am only slightly bitter about it), I’m excited that Plixer will be able to showcase Scrutinizer 8.5, the most recent version of our NetFlow and sFlow analysis software suite.

Sponsored by Cisco Systems, Cisco Live is an annual communications conference for networkers, IT managers, developers, and service providers.  Our Product Manager and our International Sales Manager will occupy Booth E9 of the Cisco Live World of Solutions exhibition from February 1st through February 3rd. Read more »

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What do these two have in common?  For most people, probably nothing.

But here at Plixer International, the last business day before the Christmas holiday break, it has been customary to set up a game server with the Quake game on it.

Everyone brings some yummy food to share (brownies, meatballs, cheese & crackers, are some of the options), and for a few hours of the day, work takes a back seat to eating and gaming.

Personally, playing Quake isn’t my idea of a good time.  Chasing opponents down dark hallways shooting at them, screams and blood.  Not for me.

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In Support it’s common to hear, “I’ve configured my device to export NetFlow, but it’s not showing up in Scrutinizer.” There are a number of reasons that can prevent a NetFlow exporter from showing up in Scrutinizer and I would like to demonstrate, using a packet analysis tool, how to isolate the problem. It’s very likely that if you’re involved with network traffic analysis or administration that you’ve used Wireshark at one point or another and I want to go over some common ways to use Wireshark to analyze your NetFlow traffic.

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Uptime Software provides Mid-Enterprises with Deep, Affordable, and Easy-to-Use IT Systems Management. They chose to integrate Scrutinizer, Plixer’s NetFlow analyzer, into their Network Monitoring solution. Check out the list of monitoring abilities.

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The nProbe configuration portion of this blog has been depreciated by the release of nProbe v6.1.1.  Please see our Recommended nProbe Templates blog for the most recent configuration.

The question, “How do I configure nProbe to export URL and Latency information?” has started to come up more often in support, so I want to take the time to demonstrate how to configure nProbe and how to analyze URLs and latency with NetFlow.

Read more »

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It was my last free day in London and I bumped into one of our favorite Time Lord’s worst enemies. Trust me, I would have much rather spent the day having fun, running around London, but this was serious!

With the words “Exterminate, Exterminate” ringing in my ear, I decided that the only way to save the human race was to find The Doctor. London is a big city and a bit foreign to me. I needed to find him and fast. I first stopped at Starbucks. A quick double espresso with an extra shot was what I needed. It could be the end of the world, no time to mess with tea.

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