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What is a NetFlow Analyzer?
By design, NetFlow products include a NetFlow Analyzer. However, NetFlow Analyzers vary greatly in features and ease of use. This is why we at Distinct, have put a lot of thought into providing you a wide range of features whilst maintaining ease-of-use in our design of the NetFlow Analyzer for Distinct NetFlowTools. The result is that the Distinct NetFlow Analyzer is a user-friendly, web based application allowing you the flexibility to make your NetFlow data easily accessible from anywhere, since it can be accessed through HTTPS as well as HTTP. The Distinct NetFlow Analyzer plays a significant role in helping administrators like yourself monitor and manage their network activity, because it provides an interpreted view of the data in addition to the NetFlow data in its raw form.
What will the NetFlow Analyzer from NetFlowTools show you?
The NetFlow Analyzer which is part of NetFlowTools provides a highly versatile interface that displays live or accumulated flows in graphical format with different views. Here are some of the ways that our NetFlow Analyzer will let you view the NetFlow data collected
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You can view the data by Bandwidth, traffic by IP address or host name, Applications (top IP protocols), or Conversations (talking pairs).
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You can display average traffic statistics down to single one second increments which means that the level of detail that can be derived from the data is extremely flexible in its granularity. Whilst the larger time range aggregation of data can give you an excellent overall picture as to the source and volume of your network traffic, the ability to zoom into that data to this level of detail should prove very helpful when trying to diagnose specific network issues.
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You can set up a view of the data from the point of view of your organization, rather than the point of view of each individual interface you are collecting flows from. This means that your graphs become easier to understand because the actual direction of traffic is more intuitive.
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You can look at live traffic as soon as the flows reach the NetFlow Collector. Live data can be viewed in a time range from the last 15 minutes to the last 120 minutes. However you can switch to viewing in “trending” mode at any time.
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You can change your view of the data on-the-fly to show graphs for any period of time that is covered in the database flows collected. This allows you to visualize the trends in your network activity and to quickly spot irregular traffic flows.
The Distinct NetFlow Analyzer sends out Alerts
You will probably agree that early detection of network problems is one of the secrets to keeping a healthy network up and running with 0 down time. This is why the NetFlow Analyzer in NetFlowTools incorporates Alarms which can be triggered when traffic throughput reaches what you have defined as a critical level. This means that you will receive an email alert allowing you the time to intervene on your network to fix problems before they become really big issues.
How close to live statistics can a NetFlow Analyzer get?
When using the NetFlowTools Analyzer to view live data as it is received, keep in mind that there will always be a very slight delay between current network activity and what you are seeing in the graphs which are reading the NetFlow data that has already reached your database. Additionally NetFlow data will usually have some inactive flows. An inactive flow is defined as a flow that has started but has not been terminated. For example, the flow initiated by an RPC request that is still waiting for a response from an RPC server will not appear in the graphs until either a response is received and the connection is closed, or the inactive timeout, which is normally thirty minutes, expires. This means that although the flow could include a large volume of data that has already traversed the network, that data will not be reported until the flow is closed, if no communication takes place within the specified timeout period. Therefore, because of the way NetFlow sends flows to the collector, viewing the data with a slight delay will give a more precise picture of the total traffic traversing the device.
So why should you choose the NetFlowTools Analyzer?
I would say for all the above reasons and more. But really, with all the information that the NetFlowTools Analyzer gives you, the question should be “why not?”
So don’t delay, request a trial today by clicking on one of the links below:
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