Guys like Stephen Covey keep me inspired. Have you read his book “Seven Habits of Highly Effective People“. I thought it was great. It lead me to believe that it was high time someone blogged about what sets NetFlow and sFlow reporting tools apart: Read more »
Michael Patterson
This is part 5 of a 4-part series on the ToS field (i.e. Differentiated Services Field) of IP frames. :) Yes, yes, it is the running joke in the office on how this 4-part blog actually has 5 parts. Heck, it’s a blog… who cares.
Make sure you have already read Part 1, Part 2, Part 3 and Part 4 of this blog.
Once again, I’ll pull in the WireShark capture from my first blog: Read more »
Michael Patterson
This is part 4 of an 4-part series (so far 4 parts) on the ToS field (i.e. Differentiated Services Field) of IP frames. I finally get into how all this relates to NetFlow in 2009. Make sure you have already read Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3 of this blog.
ToS and DSCP part 4
At the end of Part 3 of this blog series I digressed very briefly on how CBQoS can be used to modify DSCP values on packets which come into the router. In other words, VoIP traffic that comes in on ports 4569 and 5060 could enter a router with one DSCP value 0×00 and leave with a completely different one e.g. 0xEF (i.e. 11101111). Read more »
SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA: Nortel has saved around $12 million in the last one year as a result of implementing unified communications (UC) in the organization. This often means voice, video and data all done remotely using a typical laptop.
My experience with UC
Two weekends ago I was up at Lake Winnipesaukee in New Hampshire and my cell phone reception was horrible. I needed to call the office and I didn’t want to use the phone in the hotel room to run up my personal charges and go through the hassle of submitting a reimbursement at the office. I experienced UC by launching my soft phone on my PC and making a phone call after checking my email. Read more »
This is part 3 of a series on the ToS field (i.e. Differentiated Services Field) of IP frames. I’m getting closer to how it relates to NetFlow and sFlow. Make sure you have already read Part 1 and Part 2 of this blog.
ToS part 3
In this blog I copy largely from RFC 2474, which was written in 1998. I discuss how 6 bits of the 8-bit ToS is now the Differentiated Services Code Point. See the screen capture below from my first blog. This is where we are today however, many of us still refer to this field as ToS (i.e. type of service). Sometimes it is called the Differentiated Services Field (DSF) but, not as often. Read more »
I had a customer ask me how HP Procurve’s Class of Service (CoS) for VLANs could be monitored in Scrutinizer with QoS (Quality of Service).
HP Procurves export sFlow (sampled flows). Scrutinizer v6.05 listens to sFlow counters and samples. If specific VLAN tag information is sent out, Scrutinizer ignores it in the current release.
What the sFlow collector (e.g. Scrutinizer), does see is the ToS (Type of Service) byte included in the sFlow packet. The values for this 8-bit field can be defined in Scrutinizer in the QoS Definitions option in Settings. The QoS Definitions feature allows network administrators to customize their QoS settings, with the ability to run reports based on the 8 bit ToS values or 6 bit DSCP values.
I know that I already blogged about being back from SharkFest 2009. I wanted to write about my favorite keynote speaker, Dr. Lawrence Roberts. He was one of the founders of the Internet and TCP/IP.
Overview of Internet growth
During his presentation he said that 80% of Internet traffic is caused by 5% of the people and most of the traffic created by this 5% is P2P. He went on to point out that in 2008 22% of the population was online. By 2018 it will be at 99%.
On the plane ride back from Cisco Live 2009 I thought about John Chambers (CEO of Cisco) and thought about his views on video media and that it will become an important part of the traffic on our networks.
I think he is right. Look how much we use YouTube.com to post our NetFlow training videos on how to use our software. How many of you use Skype to call family and friends? It’s awesome and most of these tools are FREE!!! Hence, it is becoming more and more popular.
And the more I thought about it, the more I kept coming back to Cisco NetFlow, sFlow and this little 1-byte field called ToS (type of service). I became so inspired that I thought I’d write a white paper that would dive into the guts of this often-ignored topic. After reading various RFCs, I decided that my white paper wouldn’t get read because this topic can be boring, but a blog, if written well, can be exciting! So, I challenged myself to forget about the white paper and to blog about it. Here goes…part 1 of at least a 4-part blog.
Michael Patterson
We’ve arrived at the final part of this blog series outlining some of the great Cisco NetFlow analysis improvements that will be found in Scrutinizer 7.0. With features like the ones we’re putting out in this new version, Scrutinizer is easily one of the best values in the flow-analysis market. Let’s continue outlining some more features of Scrutinizer 7.
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I’ve been playing around with Scrutinizer v7 in the lab a lot lately. I thought I’d leak some of what is to come (see the sneak peek of Scrutinizer v7 we gave on February 20 in this blog post). Please forgive me for being a bit vague as we need to be careful. This version is a big rewrite of the front end to take advantage of AJAX and speeding up the interface to be more instant when rendering results. This list of new features is considerable. I can’t announce everything yet but, I’ll leak a few things many of you expect.
Bidirectional Trends
We have expanded a great deal in this version. InBound / OutBound trends are now available on all reports:
ToS Reports
We have expanded on this to help customers when the tags may have been changed by the router.
Google Maps
I blogged about our improved Google map support here, including saving zoom levels, connections between icons, etc. They are all in v7.
IPv6
We are working on it. More testing is needed.
Cisco NetFlow v9 Egress Reporting
Wow, can this cause problems for collectors and the statistics the front end renders. I’ve very proud of the solution our team came up with. Customers with mixed v5 and v9 environments will really appreciate the benefits.
Flexible NetFlow
We might have something. Who knows? 
Define Application Groups
You can define application groups using an amalgamation of IPs and port ranges.
Alarming and Flow Analytics
Expect to be able to alarm on just about anything. How you set this up is key. It needs to be very intuitive and not crush the collector’s performance. Expect the ability to tweak the engine to your desired needs (i.e. similar to how we do it with Flow Analytics).
Billing for Service Providers
The new architecture will be useful for accurate billing in service provider environments. Our professional services team will kick out exactly what is needed with 100% accuracy on regular intervals into a desired database format. Improved security and flexibility for service providers is in this version as well.
MyView
Some ideas were taken from iGoogle. We took it to another level with permissions.
Status Tab
More flexibility and I’ll blog later on this.
When When When?
Ever wanted something really bad with anticipation just killing you? It is still to early to give a date, but Scrutinizer v7 is worth the wait.
Thanks for reading.
Michael Patterson