My colleague Jake recently wrote about Disaster Recovery Monitoring, and about how our Incident Response System, using IPFIX/NetFlow is more helpful then tools that rely on SNMP. We at Plixer recently ran into an issue with our Microsoft Exchange Server that helps illustrate the benefit of using IPFIX/NetFlow as an analytic and investigative tool.
If you are looking for an agentless performance monitoring solution for Citrix Desktop Virtualization, consider using AppFlow or IPFIX exports from your Citrix NetScaler. AppFlow is the Citrix IPFIX export which is basically the proposed standard for NetFlow v9. Through IPFIX, Citrix is now exporting details on Applications, URLS, browser types, user details and more.
Network Performance Analysis in a virtualized environment like VMware can be a tricky beast as often times everything is encapsulated using GRE tunnels between virtual switches. What can we do? As luck would have it, most virtual switches support Netflow. Yes, vSphere NetFlow support is available.