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Released!

NetFlow Analyzer Enterprise Edition 7.0 is packed with a load of amazing features. The official PR is available here.

And happy to announce that NetFlow Analyzer Enterprise Edition supports Cisco NetFlow (and other flows), Cisco NBAR and Cisco CBQoS out–of–the–box. Download the 30-day free trial and try it out in your network setup.

Following are some of the new features added in 7.0.

Validating QoS policies with Cisco CBQoS - Enterprise edition now supports Cisco CBQoS and provides report on the per-class pre policy, post policy drops and queues. This new feature complements the already existing support for Cisco's Network based application recognition (NBAR), helping in application mapping and providing better quality of service. Read more...

User based dashboard page for guests / Operators - Each user can have their own dashboard, only viewing devices that need to be monitored by them, which can be sorted based on utilization, speed etc.

Business hour alerts - makes sure that the users do not have to worry about the alerts that might be generated during non-business hours. With the new version of NetFlow Analyzer, business hours can be preset as per the enterprise's need and the alerts can be activated only during that period.

Exclude IP address(es) option in IP groups - During creations of IP groups, the exclude option makes it much easier to exclude only particular addresses from a network as the requirement may be.

Radius authentication - Radius Server is useful in centralised management of user credential details. Once the user roles are defined in the User Management feature of NetFlow Analyzer, subsequent authentication of the user profiles can be done from the Radius Server.

Exclude encrypted applications - Enabling NetFlow on cryptomap tunnel interfaces double counts the ESP / GRE traffic. That can be prevented by applying this filter on cryptomap tunnel interfaces.

Output interface suppression - WAN optimizers compress the packets and therefore the flow size varies. The size of the packet going in and coming out is not the same, and the readings can be misleading and confusing, to say the least. To avoid this, "Output Interface Suppression" can be used. The interface in which the compression takes place (destination/output interface) can be suppressed.

ACL related drops - Access control filter drops the flow information which contains data pertaining to dropped traffic due to Access Control List.

Existing users can download the service pack. New evaluators can download the product from here.

And catchup with NetFlow Analyzer on twitter.

Cheers
Joe

Monitoring solutions involves data storage and enterprise monitoring solutions involves huge volume of data ! NetFlow data exported from monitored devices can be used to generate detailed reports for real time traffic behavior, historic reports, application performance, link utilization and so on. The data stored by the NetFlow based tools is very valuable for comparison of links over time periods, trend analysis and making capacity planning decisions which all finally helps in cost cutting. You can find many more advantages of using NetFlow data and NetFlow Analyzer from here.

With solutions that provide critical information from huge volume of data, backup and up time of the solution is as primary as any reporting feature. This brings in the need for a proper data backup mechanism which can save the day in case of a product crash, database corruption or virus attacks. Data backup can be done either online, ie. without shutting down the product or offline, which is to backup the data after shut down of the data collecting engine.

Online data backup is most commonly preferred because it does not involve product shut down and thus no down time. But, when it comes to products that involves continuous collection, storage and reporting from huge volumes of data, every day or every week scans for incremental backup can strain the product performance, affect the stability and might also cause a data corruption. Backing up data to save data from loss during future crashes causing a database corruption. A vicious circle it is !
Here, a workaround solution would be to do a offline backup by through a maintenance shut down. When the backup involved huge volumes of data, the shut down and restore is not minutes or hours, but could be days. Because down time of a business critical monitoring system is unacceptable, the last method is not even considered as a solution by many administrators.

This is where a failover mechanism can help. A failover feature has many advantages and solves multiple problems. With failover:

1. You get to to continue the network monitoring and report generation even if the primary server goes down.

2. You can have the standby server, and thus the standby database, at a remote location or even your DR center ensuring a surefire way of data backup and recovery.

3. You get an incremental data backup mechanism without ever having to shutdown the product

For an argument, one may say failover means additional servers and resources which means increased cost. But, with increasing number of hard disk failures and the high cost of data retrieval with no guarantee, adding one more server is just a percentage of cost in the long run.

And then again, there is the argument that failover or data replication is not the same as a data backup. The intention of data backup is to have a source for data to be used when the product crashes or if part of the data is corrupted due to errors. But this is exactly what the failover through database replication is achieved in the Enterprise edition of NetFlow Analyzer. The data replicated to a secondary server acts as a source to be used if the primary server is down and also can be used if the data base in the primary server is corrupted.

The Enterprise edition of ManageEngine NetFlow Analyzer, about which we have discussed earlier, with its highly scalable architecture and features for distributed setup like timezone view and hierarchical device groups, is useful for large organizations with branched offices or for enterprises with a large number of devices to be monitored. The Enterprise edition provides failover feature which can be setup and configured within a matter of minutes. All you need is a server identical to your primary server with the same or higher volume of hard disk space to which data replication takes place.

The failover feature in Enterprise edition works in such a way that the secondary server is automatically enabled when the primary one goes down. When the primary server goes down, the collectors which are sending flows to the central server will automatically redirect to the secondary server which then becomes the primary server. With a hassle free switch over and data replication, failover is the perfect data backup mechanism one needs in an enterprise network. For all those techies, Part 2 and Part 3 of this blog will explain the architecture and setting up of failover in NetFlow Analyzer Enterprise edition.

Download (30 day trial) | Interactive Demo | Product overview video

A network bandwidth monitoring tool catering to varied needs of the small, medium and large enterprises requires different architecture. Different strokes for different folks!

During many of the recent analyst briefings, I've found myself having to answer this one particular question, which was "you have two different editions - Professional and Enterprise, catering to two different markets, SMBs and large enterprises, respectively. Do you have separate architecture for the two editions or do you give the same architecture for both?"

And that question, as always, makes me real happy. Because the answer is the one that the analysts and the product evaluators want to hear. Here is the answer:

"We understand that different organizations require different solutions and the SIZE DOES MATTER. That is why we have two different architecture for the two editions. Large enterprises are usually branched out in various locations, have higher flow rates and their NetFlow data is exported through the cloud. In contrast, the small & medium businesses do not have many branch offices, have lesser interfaces to monitor and lesser flow rates. With such a huge difference in business requirements, it is obvious that a single solution cannot be suited for both. Hence, it is necessary for the NetFlow Analyzer to adapt to such a need, and adapt, we did!

Enterprise Edition was developed strictly for large enterprises and following are the list of Enterprise level special features:

Distributed architecture - Collectors at branch office and the Central server for unified central view
Highly scalable - up to 20, 000 interfaces can be monitored, with 100, 000 flows per second
HTTPS connection between the collectors and the central server
Failover- Seamless reporting
Localized Timezone - Ability to view the reports / graphs according to user timezone

All the feature of Enterprise edition can be viewed here.

Professional Edition, on the other hand, strictly caters to businesses monitoring less than 600 interfaces and do not have branch offices. The collectors and central server functionality are managed by the single server, due to lesser number of flows. All the features of professional edition can be viewed here.

Download(30 day trial) | Interactive Demo | Product overview video

Cheers

Joe

http://twitter.com/josephjay

NetFlow Analyzer Enterprise Editon 7.0 released!

Database backup - The Failover way - Part 1

Different strokes for different folks!

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