At Plixer International’s Technical Support desk we often take calls in support of our NetFlow and sFlow analysis tool that deal with disk space and disk performance issues. In the world of NetFlow and sFlow collector appliances, the name of the game is to have sufficient available disk space and minimize disk I/O. Read more »
Most of my blogs are related to NetFlow or sFlow. This weekend I’m taking a break from network traffic monitoring. My father in law, some friends and I took off snowmobiling up in Sherman, Maine.
I have so many trade show shirts that I end up wearing them on events like this from time to time. I couldn’t resist this picture below. Funny thing is, I’ve had people approach me in restaurants when they see my t-shirts for Cisco, Nortel, etc. Read more »
Michael Patterson
Hello everybody! My name is Paul Dube and I have recently graduated from the University of Maine in Orono with a degree in Computer Science and joined the support team here at Plixer International. Over the course of the past few weeks I’ve been trying to learn everything there is to know about Scrutinizer, NetFlow, sFlow and network traffic analysis. During this process I’ve come across a lot of great resources that I would like to consolidate into one place to help you get started.
Read more »
When was the last time you used a Network General Sniffer™? Do you remember the Matrix view? Read more »
Michael Patterson
NetFlow analyzers vs. packet analyzers - are really complementary technologies. For years NetFlow has been a valuable tool used to suppliment the use of packet analysis; and to a certain extent that is still the case. With the adoption of Flexible NetFlow and the new release of Scrutinizer 7.5, the value that NetFlow analysis brings to packet analysis becomes even more significant.
The top security threat in enterprise environments during the first half of the year was the Conficker worm, Microsoft says in its Security Intelligence Report (SIRv7), which covers the first six months of 2009. Read more »
Michael PattersonPlease read Part 1 of this blog first.
Why Service Providers need 95th Percentile
In an attempt to keep prices competitive and attract new customers, some service providers make efforts to bill customers based on usage. This is how the 95th percentile became standard practice. Here is how it works: A customers bandwidth is measured (or sampled) from the switch or router and recorded in a log file. In many cases, this is done every 5 minutes. At the end of the month, the samples are sorted from highest to lowest and the top 5% (which equal to approximately 36 hours of a 30-day billing cycle) of data is thrown away. The next highest measurement becomes the billable utilization for the month. Read more »
Networks tend to evolve over time. Over the past 5 – 7 years, I have seen VoIP and video push many network administrators to think beyond utilization and latency. Prioritization is an important part of the mix today. Although trying to absolutely guarantee QoS with Network traffic is impossible, it is possible to prioritize critical data and increase delivery time probabilities. Read more »
Michael Patterson
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?
Read more »
Since the release of the latest version of our NetFlow and sFlow analysis tool, I have been blogging about some of the new features that are available.
One of the new report features available gives you the ability to filter on conversations and show user defined applications that were involved in those conversations.
