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).

Read more »

Jon Mills
Marketing & Public Relations Manager
Follow Me On Twitter

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
Follow Me on Twitter

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:

Read more »

Jon Mills
Marketing & Public Relations Manager
Follow Me On Twitter

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.

Read more »

Jon Mills
Marketing & Public Relations Manager
Follow Me On Twitter

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:

Read more »

“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.

Read more »

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
Follow Me on Twitter

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

If you are not fortunate enough to have equipment that supports Cisco NetFlow technology, but still need to know bandwidth utilization statistics across network links, then there may be no better solution than the combination of SNMP and MRTG.

MRTG (or Multi Router Traffic Grapher) is a free software tool, developed by Tobias Oetiker, that uses SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol) to poll network devices. MRTG stores the retrieved data to a log file, where it then generates a graphical representation of the stored data.

There are several third party network monitoring tools, like Denika, that use MRTG and SNMP as the means to capture this valuable data. In Denika’s case, the functionality of MRTG is expanded on by incorporating a MySQL database, which provides long term data storage.

If you have ever used MRTG, then you know that it is not easy to configure. MRTG uses a system of templates to send the neccessary object identifiers (OIDs) to the device, which then must have a MIB (or management information base).

Plixer has gone a long way to simplifying this process by making its database of MRTG templates available on the web. In Plixer’s MRTG repository, one can browse a number of different vendors, hardware models and templates. So whether you want to gather port utilization information on your Adtran devices, or frame relay utilization on your Cisco Catalyst 6509, or maybe just CPU utilization on your Foundry BigIron switch, it’s much easier to configure MRTG using Plixer’s MRTG repository.

~ Jon Mills

Jon Mills
Marketing & Public Relations Manager
Follow Me On Twitter