One of the questions discussed during the webinar was ‘How to analyze network traffic, if you don’t have a Cisco device in your network’
Really a good question!
I thought there could be more administrators having the same question in mind. Here is a post on network traffic analysis for Non-Cisco environments.
Although NetFlow is proprietary to Cisco, the widespread acceptance of this technology made other network device vendors to either support this protocol or come up with a similar feature for their devices with a different name:
For instance Adtran, Riverbed, Enterasys, Extreme Networks, Foundry Networks started supporting NetFlow, whereas other vendors created their own or started supporting a open flow model like…
- sFlow for Hewlett–Packard/ Hitachi
- Jflow for Juniper Networks
- NetStream for 3Com/H3C/ Huawei
- IPFIX for Nortel, etc…
OpManager’s NetFlow module / NetFlow Analyzer supports traffic analysis for a broad variety of Flows to help you analyze network traffic; to name few NetFlow, sFlow, cflowd, J-Flow, IPFIX, NetStream & more…
To know the complete list of supported vendor devices and Flows for OpManager’s NetFlow Module and NetFlow Analyzer click here…
But, here is another problem. What if you can’t find your devices in the above link…! The fact is, you can still export NetFlow using free NetFlow generating tools like fprobe , nProbe and pfflowd for your critical interfaces/ ports.
Simply mirror the traffic to be analyzed to another interface and forward this traffic to the server which runs the free NetFlow generating tool. Now these tools help you export NetFlow records to NetFlow Analyzer or OpManager’s NetFlow module for further traffic analysis and reports.
Alternatively, instead of free NetFlow generating tools, you can also opt for hardware based dedicated flow exporting appliances like GigaFin’s FlowLine .
Hope you find this post useful.
-Kalvin
More info at: www.opmanager.com
The network monitoring software from ManageEngine
