When it comes to traffic reporting and network troubleshooting to find bottlenecks or bandwidth spikes, complete port-level analysis of raw flows is required to find the cause of issues.
NetFlow Analyzer’s troubleshooting report with sub-minute visibility helps identify network spikes, bandwidth saturation, and more. The Troubleshooting Report gives complete port-level information for the selected time as it is generated completely from raw NetFlow data. Learn more about data storage patterns in NetFlow Analyzer.
In the older version, raw data could be stored for a maximum of one month, and user were able to drill down to each and every flow for identifying bandwidth spikes only for 30 days.
Yes, 30 days’ worth of raw storage is not sufficient when it comes to detailed analysis for the entire year to do capacity planning or government auditing. Certain countries mandate storing raw traffic flow data for more than six months.
When it comes to ISPs or MSPs, they want all their customer data to be stored for more than three months for accurate billing purposes.
All these things in mind, we on the NetFlow Analyzer team released a new feature: the HighPerf Reporting Engine.
What is this HighPerf Reporting Engine?
The HighPerf Reporting Engine of NetFlow Analyzer is a highly scalable database for raw storage alone; it can store raw data for more than six months.
One might wonder if storing all the flows from devices for more than six months would take up significant disk space or if report generation would be sluggish when looking at a longer time period. The HighPerf Reporting Engine uses a columnar database, which is best suited for instantaneous report generation for a longer time period, and compressed storage.
Here are the advantages offered by NetFlow Analyzer’s HighPerf Reporting Engine:
- Increased raw data storage capacity
- Instant report generation
- Columnar database
- Shortened lookup time
- Faster troubleshooting
- Improved data compression
- Better capacity planning
- Insightful reports
- Better bandwidth management
How to deploy the HighPerf Reporting Engine
Starting in this latest version, NetFlow Analyzer by default comes with PostgreSQL, which can be used to store 30 days’ worth of raw data and lifelong aggregated data (used for historical reporting).
This HighPerf Reporting Engine comes as a plug-in that has to be installed on top of the NetFlow Analyzer installation, or you can download the complete package that contains this plug-in.
It is also possible to host the HighPerf database engine on a remote host and connect NetFlow Analyzer to this database.
In our next blog, we will go through the installation of the HighPerf Reporting Engine in detail.
