Earlier in my blogs,we have explored different technologies and features that are offered by NetFlow Analyzer related to bandwidth monitoring. This blog post is about a futuristic reporting feature.

The future is going to be IPV6(yes! it is officially launched) networks ranging from small to large are slowly migrating to IPV6 and for sure the IPV4 will be faced off soon.

Here few advantages of IPV6:

• Simplified Addressing

• Auto Configuration

• Mobility

• Secure communication

NetFlow Analyzer as a bandwidth monitoring tool quickly adopted this migration and brought a preliminary support to IPV6, that is we can see IPV6 related information in the raw data reports.

For detail study on data storage pattern in NetFlow Analyzer, visit this link.

IPV6 related conversations, sources and destinations can be seen under Source, Destination and Conversation Tabs when you drill down to an interface and generate report for lesser than 2 Hours from the current time.

The troubleshooting report will also show the IPV6 related conversation report, Click here to know more about Troubleshooting Report.

Soon you can see IPV6 support in Aggregated data and IP group reporting.

For 30 Day Trial, click Download now.

Thanks and Regards

Praveen Kumar

We grew up in the times of bits, bytes, kilobytes and megabytes. In the last decade we got amazingly familiar with GBs and TBs. In today’s world, we no longer talk in terms of KBs or MBs. It did take ten long years for our minds to get used to GBs from MBs. But, it is not going to be the same anymore. In three years, we would be talking casually about zettabytes.

The rise in the usage of non-PC devices like smartphones, tablets and smart TVs, IP traffic would grow at an exponential rate and touch the zettabyte mark by 2015.

The demand for HD and 3D is on the rise too and is expected to contribute to more than 70% of total video traffic by 2015 which means more demand for bandwidth.

All of this puts immense pressure on the administrator to ensure sufficient bandwidth for vital applications running on the Enterprise networks. There isn’t any reason to be surprised if HD video conferencing and 3D virtual boardrooms become reality. When that happens, the demand for enterprise network bandwidth would increase manifolds. It would be imperative for you as an Administrator to provision adequate bandwidth for delay-free, jitter-free and prompt delivery of these bandwidth-intensive yet critical applications.

Any compromise on the quality of service of these latency and delay-sensitive applications would result in undesirable consequences. In this scenario, QoS will no longer remain an option but a mandatory aspect of network management. Contrary to popular myths that revolve around QoS, it isn’t difficult to design and implement. As our attempt to help end-users realize the full potential of QoS, ManageEngine presented a webinar jointly with Cisco on ‘QoS Design and validation for Enterprises’. For those of you that missed it, here is the recording of the webinar.

The release of the latest version of ManageEngine IT360 happened last week - the 9050 version release. It was a milestone release with several new features! I shall discuss the top 3 features from this release...

• IT360 has optimized its web console enabling mobile access using iPad
• Diagnostics
• Maps

Accessing IT360 from an iPad

A good number of vendors are starting to support access of their network management software from tablets / iPads. One of the ways is based on modifying / optmizing the already available web-based consoles. The two important challenges here are:

a. determine which parts of the network management application would be accessed by the network admin / Manager, while on the move or while on a vacation; not every aspect / part of the conventional web based network management tool would be required; what level of granular information would be required; the ease of navigation, etc.

b. how to deliver the information / functionality with the form factors of mobile devices

These were some of the considerations that went in and finally ManageEngine IT360 decided to support accssing the IT360 web console from an iPad with the following features / functionality.

• Alarms
• Infrastructure Snapshots
• Business Services
• Capability to Search device

More features would be added in the upcoming releases of IT360 for iPad!

The Alarms View

The Infrastructure View

The Business Service View

Diagnostics in IT360

The Diagnostic Tool in IT360 helps you identify a problem, provide valuable information about the problem and also suggest a solution. Diagnosis happens in two modes:

1. Services mode and,
2. Log parsing

The problems are defined in three states:

1. Error [represented by a circle in Red]
2. Warning [represented by a circle in Orange]
3. Discard [represented by a circle in Grey]

When a problem is of a high severity, it is shown in Error state [red]; when a problem is of a lesser severity, it is shown in Warning state [Orange]. When a corrective action is taken, manually or automatically, the Error / Warning state moves [automatically or manually] to a Discard state [Grey]. There are situations when corrective actions happens automatically from within the system, without any manual intervention. For such Errors / Warnings, the state changes to Discard during the next polling. There are situations when a manual corrective action is required. Under such conditions, you need to manually change the Error / Warning state events to Discard [after taking the corrective action].

For more information on this, please refer to the online help document here.

Topology Maps [View]

ManageEngine IT360 supports the concept of Maps as a means to view data in a graphical format. The Maps View is used to represent network devices and servers. It is used to represent a limited number, say, a critical set of network devices and servers. Being a logical entity, you can group a certain set of network devices and servers of your choice under a Map View and also associate links between them. You use Maps View when you want to view, say, a small number of network devices and servers that are otherwise spread across the globe or across different locations. You may also create a sub map view within a map and display the same as a shortcut icon in a Map View.

Background images [global maps, etc..] can be used for the Map View using the available default images or, you may import your own background image.

You may also create any number of Maps [and sub maps]. Any sub map is shown as a shortcut icon in a Map View.

For more information on Maps, please refer to the online help document here.

For a demo

iPad demo: http://t-it360demo.manageengine.com/

Product demo: http://www.manageengine.com/it360/request-demo.html

K.Lakshmi Shankar

In continuation to our earlier posts Non-intrusive & Real-time Monitoring of Corporate Users’ Internet Activity Part - I, Part - II, and Part - III, we will now show you how to monitor corporate users' Internet activity with Firewall Analyzer - Custom Report.

Use Case 3: Custom Report

With Firewall Analyzer you can create a custom report to get the web sites (URLs) visited by network users. The custom report generated will be available under ‘My Reports’.

This report displays the details of the web sites accessed by an enterprise user like, URLs, URL Categories, Number of visits (Hits), Date & Time of visit, Duration of visit, Total bytes consumed, Resource, Source, Destination, Protocol, Bytes sent and Bytes received. The details can be chosen as per requirement.

The screen shot of web access report for user ‘samuel’ is displayed below:

The procedure to create a report profile is given below.

Step 1:

Create custom report using Add New > Report Profile menu.

Step 2:

Select the required device(s).   Add a new filter for the report profile of select an existing filter.  

Add a new report filter.   Include or exclude the Protocols, IP/Hosts, Destination, Events, and User in the filter. The ‘include’ and ‘exclude’ filter criteria combination offers basic level correlation. Select 'Include the following User'. Specify the user to be filter as 'samuel' in the text box and add it.

Step 3:

Select the graphical and table report types. If required schedule the periodic generation of report

Configure the graphical setting of the report

Configure the table setting of the report

With this, web sites access report for each user can be generated. As you can see the filters and report settings are so flexible that versatile reports can be created to monitor the employee web usage.

Read about ‘How Lake Health, a leading community health care provider in Northeast Ohio, efficiently monitors internet bandwidth utilization & accelerates decision-making using ManageEngine Firewall Analyzer’

This blog give you a detail information on RAW data and its uses in NetFlow Analyzer.

NetFlow Analyzer stores two types of data i.e. Raw data and Aggregated data. Raw data pertains to each and every flow information that is been exported from the devices. This contains information such as TCP flag, Number of packets, Next hop information along with Port, protocol and the IP addresses.

Aggregated data pertains to the top 100 flows (all fields in NetFlow data exported) based on the bytes for every interface for every 10 minute interval. Older data is repeatedly rolled up into less granular times (10 minute, 1 hour, 6 hour, 24 hour and weekly).

As Raw data contains each and every flow information this consumes huge disk space. You can store the raw data based on the flow rate and the disk space available in the server and so is set to be stored for maximum of 30 days . To make it simple NetFlow Analyzer itself display the flow rate and the time period you can store the raw data. You can view this information by navigating to Admin → Raw Data Settings as shown below:

In this page you can also trigger alert if the free disk space goes below threshold limit and to automatically delete the older raw data when disk space goes below a specified percentage.

The raw data is used in the product when generating 'Troubleshoot' reports and the last 2 hours reports will be generated from the raw data. The raw data has complete port level information which helps in detailed analysis of traffic.

Last 2 hour Reports:

In NetFlow Analyzer for the time period like 15, 30 minutes and last hour information will be queried from RAW data. From this selected period of time you can expand the show data point under the traffic tab to view the link utilization for each minute.

If you wanted to have a look at a minute data you can click on the hyper link available for that time period. This will display all the conversation happened during that minute. You can export the information in a PDF or CSV format, even you can email the report.

Note: Hyper link will not be available if it exceed the Raw data storage time period.

To Generate Troubleshooting report Drill down to an interface, click on More Report → Troubleshooting report.

In this report you can enter in source and destination IP Addresses or the protocol, to view the amounted of data transferred from the selected period of time.

To find the amount of data transferred between to two host for the selected period of time, you can add criteria and specify the IP addresses and select 'Match all the following. This will display each and every conversation happened between the two host. You can also add the port or the Application you wanted to have a look. By this you can find out the information passed between them.

Arun Karthik Asokan

The business needs of enterprises are in a constant state of flux. A variety of people, including employees, technicians, partners and contractors require secure access to critical IT resources for a variety of purposes. And quite often, to cater to urgent business needs, administrative access is required to be granted. While there are numerous tools to grant access to the servers and other resources, it is absolutely essential to track what users are doing with access.

With cyber-threats looming large, network administrators, who are tasked with the responsibility of facilitating access, are also required to ensure network security. Convenience and security had always remained orthogonal goals. As security arise not only from the untrusted outsiders, but also very much from the 'trusted insiders', administrators are facing a challenging task.

Desktop Central lets you to access any computer in LAN or WAN remotely and helps you to video record the activity automatically. The flexibility in controlling the video quality, format (codec), video size etc. eases your audit. Finally, through a simple click under the history tab one can understand “Who did What” (Session Videos)

To download a free trial and further details about the product visit www.manageengine.com/desktopcentral

• 5 vulnerabilities can lead to Remote Code Execution
• 2 vulnerabilities can lead to Elevation of Privilege

• All Supported Operating Systems.
• Microsoft Office
• Microsoft Silverlight
  
• .Net Framework
  

                                   
                                      

I have been discussing a lot about Integrated IT Management, provided to organizations by IT360, and how it solves the visibility issue that most of IT directors and CIOs have faced in past. We are going one step further by providing real-time IT visibility on your iPad; as the concept of BYOD is making in-roads and Apple is trying its best to enter into enterprise market with iPad. We realize that our customers shouldn’t be exempted from being part of this technology shift to tablets.

Using the first edition of the iPad extension, customers can view the following:

·         Alarms

·         Infrastructure snapshots

·         Status of their business-critical services

As mentioned earlier this begins our new journey in to the tablet world. We will be adding more and more features into the iPad extension in every release from here on. You can use your iPad to view a live demo on how the new product extension works by clicking here.

Apart from this we have also rolled out topology maps with this edition. IT360 customers can now configure their network devices and servers based on the location. Here is a dashboard view displaying what the topology maps look like today. We have plans to make it more real-time and dynamic in our future releases. These maps are designed using the HTML5 technology to support iOS devices too.

With businesses asking more from IT, IT can barely afford to be down for a few minutes, leave alone a longer downtime situation. A few environmental issues are inevitable due to the IT setup of particular organization.

We have introduced another new feature in IT360 called Diagnostics. With this feature we are trying to make the product more self-reliable and independent. Now instead of going through those long and purely technical log files to find the root problem, IT360 conducts a diagnosis of the log files and points to the issue on the dashboard. You can expect a reduced MTTR with this feature.

With respect to MSPs/ Service Providers, we have brought in a feature to help with multi-level rebranding which is also known as Partner Management. With this our MSP customers can enhance the trust and relationships among their partners, now MSP partners can promote their brand without thinking about losing customers.

Apart from all these, we have made several other enhancements to the product; details of which can be gathered from our release notes here.

You can download the latest edition here and try the latest features in your environment. Click here to download

Have any doubts? E-mail us to it360-eval [at]manageengine [dot] com

Cheers,

Suvish

Related Links:

ManageEngine IT360 latest edition download: http://bit.ly/K48myz

Latest edition desktop demo: http://bit.ly/iN47Rj

Latest edition iPad demo: http://www.manageengine.com/it360/it360-ipad.html

Service pack: http://bit.ly/K2ojEv