A customer called in the other day after they had set up a map in Scrutinizer NetFlow and sFlow Analyzer.  They had some blank connections to devices that didn’t support NetFlow and they were asking if there was anything they could do to make the map more useful for these devices. I asked them if they used our SNMP trender Denika, and they said, “Yes.” So, we set up the integration with Denika and Scrutinizer, then started configuring Denika connections on their Scrutinizer Map.

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Paul Dube
Technical Support
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Consider this – customer calls in and says that a workstation on his network was scanning their entire corporate network and how can he be alerted on this type of behavior? The behavior wasn’t exactly malicious, but rather that someone had installed an inventory application on their desktop  which scanned their entire network with snmp scans.

So, no, it wasn’t malicious activity, but that sort of network monitoring also was not authorized for that individual on their network.

Using Scrutinizer NetFlow and sFlow Analyzer, he asked how he could detect that sort of network traffic.
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Plixer International, your team of friendly neighborhood NetFlow specialists, has just released the newest version of Flowalyzer, our NetFlow and sFlow configuration tool. In addition to some performance and usability enhancements, version 2.0 adds a new tab to the Flowalyzer interface.

Flowalyzer version 2.0 introduces The Trender

The latest addition to the Flowalyzer tool is the Trender tab, which creates graphs for critical Windows resources, all done in real-time (a configurable update period that defaults to once every second). The Trender uses SNMP information gathered from your compliant gear to measure metrics from interface utilization to CPU or memory consumption. There is no limit to the number of metrics you can trend simultaneously (aside from the obvious limitation of screen real estate).

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Jon Mills
Marketing & Public Relations Manager
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As most of us are aware, one of NetFlow’s primary intended uses was for network traffic billing. Although it is largely used for network traffic analysis and baselines, I thought I would take this opportunity to point out how it can be used by service providers interested in our NetFlow billing module. Read more »

Michael Patterson
Scrutinizer Product Manager

In case you haven’t noticed, NetFlow support for Cisco ASA firewalls is a hot topic around here lately. Since Mike helped you get NetFlow configured using ASDM 6.2 on your Cisco ASA, I thought I might blog about how to configure SNMP on your Cisco ASA using ASDM.

The first order of business is to navigate to the screen shown below:

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Jon Mills
Marketing & Public Relations Manager
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When we visit our local doctor, sometimes we don’t always agree with what they have to say. Sure, we didn’t go to medical school and we don’t have a fancy degree on our wall. But heck, it’s our body and once in a while we know something just isn’t right. So what do we do? We get a second opinion. The same concept is important in almost any part of life – even network management. Sometimes something just doesn’t seem right, and we need to get a second opinion before we blindly trust what our hardware and software is telling us.

For years, Plixer (yes, even in our Somix days) has been using an excellent free tool called GetIf for walking MIBs and verifying SNMP information. It allows support technicians and users to verify device settings and configurations. It’s important to have these small, but incredibly useful, tools on hand. Whenever something doesn’t go as planned during setup, the first question to ask is always, “Is it the software or is it the hardware?” When helping customers and evaluators setup Denika Performance Trender to monitor their SNMP enabled devices, GetIf has always been invaluable in helping answer that question.

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Jon Mills
Marketing & Public Relations Manager
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OK, let’s say you’ve decided to live a healthier life. You’re exercising regularly, stopped getting drunk every night, and you’re eating healthy. You’ve been eating more salads, almost cut out red meat, and even eating annoyingly healthy desserts, if any. Read more »

Cisco IOS IP Service Level Agreements (SLAs) help network administrators ensure that a high level of voice and data communication quality is maintained. Cisco IP SLA operations are a proactive method of reliably measuring network performance. IP SLA data can be retrieved and trended with an SNMP Performance trender to enable users to graph performance over time. Cisco IP SLA and SNMP should be in the tool belt of every network administrator. Pair these technologies with a NetFlow analyzer and you’ve got a great setup to help troubleshoot most network problems.

The purpose of this blog is to outline some of the IP SLA configuration changes in newer versions of Cisco’s IOS.

We’ve written a 4-part blog in the past that focuses on the following IP SLA operations:

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“Why don’t I see my VLAN traffic?”  was the question one of our customers asked me the other day. Although other Cisco models were exporting flows properly, it seemed that all of his Cisco 7600s were under reporting traffic.

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I found something interesting on the Cisco Systems web site. According to Cisco’s forecast, global IP traffic in 2008 stands at more than 10 exabytes per month and will more than quadruple to approach 44 exabytes per month in 2012.

I thought Cisco’s forecast was interesting because I’m not one of those who believes the Internet is going to crash. I do believe that Nathan is right about network forecasting being important.

Anyway, I got to thinking that this topic was worth blogging about again. The Cisco article inspired me to go check out our Internet connection. We added network traffic forecasting to Denika years ago:

Notice you can take you mouse and zoom in on a time frame above to get more details:

Denika can forecast on anything (e.g. database response times, temperature, Cisco CBQoS, etc.). It is not limited to SNMP OIDs.

Michael Patterson
Scrutinizer Product Manager