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Author: Kelly Kading

Kelly Kading is the Regional Manager for the Northeast US here at Plixer. Kelly strives to deliver the best customer experience possible. He enjoys building relationships with his customers and wants to find the solution to best meet their needs. When not in the office, Kelly tries to always be in the outdoors. His favorite hobbies are hiking, snowshoeing, traveling and generally just being outside!
Configuration

nprobe: octetDeltaCount Vs. postOctetDeltaCount

Posted on - by Kelly Kading

We had a customer approach us the other day with an nprobe issue. Apparently, he could see the NetFlow v9 data in Flow View of Scrutinizer, but he couldn’t report on the data. How come?

He sent us a Wireshark packet capture and brought up Flow View. Flow View is a way to see the raw flows (inclusive of all columns) being exported by a device.

Anyway, in Flow View everything looked normal, but then one of our developers spotted the word ‘post’ in front of a couple of import column names. We (and Scrutinizer) expect to see ‘octetDeltaCount’ and instead, the customer had configured nProbe to kick out ‘postOctetDeltaCount’.

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Network Operations

Free SNMP graphing tool available in Flowalyzer v2.0!

Posted on - by Kelly Kading

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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NetFlow

BEWARE: Cisco Egress NetFlow with Flexible NetFlow

Posted on - by Kelly Kading

Most people collecting NetFlow use it in a very traditional fashion (i.e. NetFlow v5 with ingress flows). Ingress flow means that only inbound (i.e. received) traffic is collected and exported in NetFlow datagrams. This may sound like you won’t know what is going ‘out’ an interface, but have no fear. There is any easy way to calculate outbound traffic using ingress NetFlow.

determining OutBound using Ingress

Above, out bound utilization on interface 1 is determined by looking at the flows from interfaces 2,3 & 4 that are destined for interface 1. Since an ingress flow contains the source and destination interface (i.e. port of the router). Out bound traffic is determined by using ingress flows from the other interfaces. For this reason, it is important to enable NetFlow on all interfaces of the switch or router. This trick is common practice in all NetFlow reporting tools. But, what about NetFlow v9 and its support for ‘Egress’ NetFlow (i.e. traffic going out an interface)?

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NetFlow

Scrutinizer 7.5 brings Matrix NetFlow Visualization, NBAR Traffic Inspection and Flow Expert Window

Posted on - by Kelly Kading

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.

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NetFlow

Watch the Cisco ASA and NBAR NetFlow Reporting Webinar Recording

Posted on - by Kelly Kading

If you missed the NetFlow training webinars Plixer offered over the last three days, then feel free to watch the recording we made of Thursday’s presentation. The webinar, which covered Cisco ASA and NBAR NetFlow reporting, was presented by Scrutinizer NetFlow & sFlow Analyzer Product Manager, Michael Patterson.

launch Cisco ASA and NBAR NetFlow Reporting webinar

As always, keep an eye out for emails from Plixer for future webinar invitations. We also try to post many of these signups on our blog. Thanks for watching!