Brian Davenport, Author at Plixer

Username reporting: NetFlow integration with Splunk

I was recently able to explore the Splunk software development kit with a customer. This helped me to implement another way to get username attribution within Plixer Scrutinizer. It’s a great addition to past methods such as Active Directory, Cisco ISE, and CounterACT because in many cases user information will already be logged in Splunk, which saves duplicate work with multiple systems.

SD-WAN visibility

Advanced Silver Peak monitoring with IPFIX

07.29.20 - Brian Davenport

Competition generally ends up being good for the consumer. It keeps prices down and forces innovation as vendors compete for market share. A great example of this has been the explosion of vendors and features in the SD-WAN market—and from my perspective, one of the best things to come out of this has been the visibility offered from the enhanced metadata exports of the key players.

VPN traffic monitoring

Top five VPN monitoring use cases

05.13.20 - Brian Davenport

With the dramatic shift to work from home, Plixer has been working with people all over the globe to visualize VPN traffic in a variety of different ways. I wanted to take some time to capture what the top five most common use cases I have been asked for are along with some examples of what the reports look like.

Network Operations

Where should I enable flow data?

03.04.20 - Brian Davenport

The big boss had a conference call over the weekend. She sent a message to your boss’s boss, which trickled downhill, and eventually made its way to you in the form of a text message.

Network Traffic Analysis

Reporting on Microsoft O365 with flow data

01.01.20 - Brian Davenport

When thinking about extracting maximum value from network metadata such as Netflow, IPFIX, SFlow, etc., data enrichment becomes extremely important.