Being a niche player in the SAAS market, Zoho brings an amazing level of engineering expertise to ManageEngine in building highly secure and scalable distributed applications. And hopefully you know, Adventnet has recently changed its name to Zoho Corp and formed three divisions namely ManageEngine, Zoho, and WebNMS.

 ManageEngine NetFlow Analyzer Enterprise Edition is a truly distributed NetFlow collection and reporting application, purpose-built for large organizations managing hundreds and thousands of networking devices and links across their geographically distributed business locations. When we started building NetFlow Analyzer Enterprise Edition, one of the biggest challenges we faced was improving the flow handling capacity and building a unified view of geographically separated networks. After experiments, the engineering team concluded that offloading flow collection from the reporting center drastically improved the flow handling capacity.

 Below is the architecture of our distributed edition. You can see the collectors are deployed at every major business locations and data centers for flow collection. These collectors compresses the exported flow data and sends it via HTTPS connection to the central server for reporting purposes. Here, most of the flow processing functionalities were offloaded to collectors which helps the central server to generate reports within seconds for any particular device.

NetFlow Analyzer EE Architecture
Many of the NetFlow Analyzers available in the market are not truely distributed in nature. They parse and store the flow records in the same collector and cannot give you the unified view of all the collection points. And there is no automatic crash recovery of data is possible. Unlike in ManageEngine, it involves individual backup and upgrade procedures which requires lot of maintenance activities. All these procedures are automated in ManageEngine NetFlow Analyzer Enterprise Engine via failover and smart upgrade manager technologies. And this is why we call ManageEngine NetFlow Analyzer is a Enterprise class distributed NetFlow collection and reporting engine suitable for any large organisations. And when we say distributed we mean it.

Before you start evaluating a distributed and scalable netflow monitoring solution, please ensure that you have the following Enterprise class features are available.

1. Distributed flow collection capability and optimized bandwidth usage between collectors and central reporting server.
2. Scales upto 20000 interface with 15000 flows per second. Any number of collectors can be added without any additional license.
3. Support for NetFlow V5,V7,V9 /sFlow, JFlow, NetStream, IPFIX.
4. Support for Cisco NBAR and correlate NBAR data with NetFlow data.
5. Support for CB-QoS (Class Based - Quality of Service) monitoring. Identify Pre and Post policy metrics and fine tune your QoS configurations.
6. Failover support - automatic crash recovery and data replication. Please visit this link for more information.
7. Ability to use your existing SAN (Storage Area Network).
8. Compatible with VM ware.
9. No data loss even after a link failure between Collectors and Central Server.
10. Ensure separate 64 bit binaries are available for increased flow handling and reporting performance.
11. Secure data transfer - https mode between collector and central server
12. Smart upgrade manager. Upgrade patchs are pushed automatically from the central console to collectors. 
12. User defined dashboards and views.
13. Group devices based on their location and build tree view for easy access and troubleshooting.
14. Ability to work in multiple time zones
15. Network Forensics using raw data


NetFlow Analyzer EE View


 And remember thousands of users like Cisco,Adobe, Ferrari and many fortune companies cannot be wrong.

 Please download and try our 30 day full featured trial edition in the following link


Full Feature List is available in the following link


  Kindly write your questions to netflowanalyzer-eesupport@manageengine.com. We are happy to assist you at any moment. 

Thanks
Raj

 Growing network needs complicate the job of network administrators and bring in new challenges. Network Administrators need robust,cutting-edge network management tools to quickly troubleshoot network incidents and increase the network performance. However considering the economic situation, it is very important to choose the right application which can leverage on network performance management data from multiple technologies and of course at an affordable cost. 

       ManageEngine NetFlow Analyzer team constantly interacts with its customers, technology companies and VARS to prioritize the road map. Whenever a new technology is introduced in the product, all existing customers see an immediate value by means of simple free upgrade instead of paying a hefty price. Here the ROI includes cutting bandwidth upgrade costs due to increased visibility using ManageEngine NetFlow Analyzer, avoid unauthorized bandwidth usage and increase the efficiency of business critical applications with almost zero implementation cost.

Multiple technologies - Single Solution:

Cisco NetFlow:

       Cisco's NetFlow technology exports flow records from any IOS capable routers and switches. The exported flow records contain information about protocols, ports, source, destination IP addresses and much more. 

       NetFlow Analyzer provides several instant reports to monitor bandwidth including top talkers, top protocols, top conversations, and more. Apart from these pre-defined bandwidth reports, NetFlow Analyzer also includes options to search for specific bandwidth usage details based on IP address, host name, protocol, and more.

NetFlow Based Bandwidth Information

Bandwidth Monitoring without Probes

       NetFlow Analyzer does network bandwidth monitoring using NetFlow. NetFlow exports are collected, correlated, and analyzed to get granular details to monitor bandwidth usage across each WAN link. There is no need for hardware probes to monitor bandwidth usage. NetFlow Analyzer is an all software solution which is suitable for both Windows and Linux.

Real-time Bandwidth Monitoring

       Bandwidth monitoring reports for each interface shows the current, average, and peak bandwidth usage patterns across each NetFlow-enabled interface. With these bandwidth usage statistics you can get instant visibility into how much bandwidth was used up by hosts, applications, and conversations across a specific interfaces.

Application-wise Bandwidth Distribution

       To monitor bandwidth utilized by different applications, NetFlow Analyzer gives you instant visibility into which applications are using up maximum bandwidth. You can also drill down to see the top sources, destinations and conversations using the bandwidth. With such granular detail, network troubleshooting and problem resolution take far less time than with traditional tools.

Cisco NBAR:

    Cisco NBAR (Network Based Application Recognition) engine runs on the IOS and does deep packet inspection to identify applications riding on regular ports. For example TCP 80 can be identified as kazza2, BitTorrent, Napster etc. The respective utilization, volume and speed can be polled through SNMP protocol over time.

NBAR Reports


    NBAR reports are very useful to set the Quality of Service (CB-QoS) policies. NBAR and QoS policies can work together to prevent bandwidth stealing applications and increase the efficiency of business critical applications.

Cisco CB-QoS (Class Based - Quality of Service):

      We have discussed a lot about deploying CB-QoS policies for improved network performance. You can find CB-QoS blog series in this link.  Cisco    CB-QoS is the simplest way to prioritize network traffic. 

CB-QoS Reports

Having insights over pre and post policy metrics, network administrators can modify their CB-QoS policy configuration for improved performance and to avoid any impact to business critical applications due to misconfiguration.

       This is why we call ManageEngine NetFlow Analyzer is a powerful traffic analysis and forensic solution for a network of any size. Try our 30 days all feature version and write your queries to  netflowanalyzer-support@manageengine.com

Thanks

Raj

Download | Interactive Demo | Product overview video