Fluke Recording Equipment manual Introduction, What is NetFlow?, What is NetFlow Tracker?

User’s Guide – version 3.1.3 NetFlow Tracker

Introduction

This document is the user manual for NetFlow Tracker, a software product designed to collect NetFlow information from Cisco equipment and present it in a meaningful way. This document does not provide any assistance with Cisco equipment itself. Please consult your Cisco documentation for any queries you have relating to the equipment itself. For more information on NetFlow from the Cisco website, go to http://www.cisco.com/go/netflow.

What is NetFlow?

A network flow is a sequence of packets between a given source and destination in one direction only. Cisco routers store and export information about the network flows they handle for network management purposes; high-end routers and switches use network flows to accelerate security processing. In order to distinguish flows from one another, the source and destination addresses and application (TCP/UDP) port numbers are used. The IP Type of Service byte, protocol type and the ifIndex of the input interface are also used to uniquely identify the flow to which a packet belongs.

What is NetFlow Tracker?

NetFlow Tracker provides a powerful but easy-to-use set of dynamic charts and reports to help the network administrator make sense of the NetFlow information provided by his routers. The focus is on troubleshooting and diagnostics; long-term analysis is not catered for.

Features and Benefits

•Highly detailed view of network traffic without the need for costly probes.

•Web-based front end allows users anywhere on the network to use the system.

•Straightforward installation and configuration.

•Can be installed on Windows, Linux and Solaris based servers.

•Per-minute resolution.

•Traffic statistics visible just minutes after the event.

•Allows rapid diagnosis of network congestion and failure.

•Useful when configuring QoS to examine the effect of a change in policy.

•Stores one week of full information by default.

•All real-time reports and charts can be filtered on any field.

•Every real-time report and chart allows drilldown on each row or area.

•Every real-time chart allows zooming in and drilling down on a selected time range.

•Custom long-term reports and charts can be created.

•Custom executive reports can be defined and easily accessed.

•Every report and chart can be formatted as CSV for further processing.

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