OptiView^® NetFlow Tracker

NetFlow Tracker’s in-depth visibility allows you to see information on all network conversations passing through the interfaces of supported routers and switches.

• Provides detailed insight into how application traffic usage is impacting network performance
• NetFlow and IPFIX data is only as good as a tool’s ability to collect, store, and report on EVERY flow that is traversing your infrastructure – OptiView Netflow Tracker is the first and only tool that allows you to keep all flows, all the time, for an infinite amount of time
• See what "Top N" reporting tools can't show you; what's really happening on your network
• Instead of telling you what you already know, Tracker helps you understand the impact of voice, viruses, hacking, multicast, DNS, peer-to-peer and worms.

Performance and Scalability
NetFlow Tracker has been designed to provide quality reports to the end user as quickly as possible. When operating on suitable hardware (see below), we have established recommendations to ensure the best possible performance.

Router and Switch Requirements
Cisco, Juniper and Nortel - various NetFlow or IPFIX-enabled switches and routers, given appropriate hardware and software support. Cisco 6500 and 4500 series switches are capable of exporting NetFlow, given the appropriate hardware.

Any device capable of exporting NetFlow or IPFIX. For the software to function properly with a device, the exports must contain correct ifIndex information and have otherwise well-formed NetFlow export packets.

Any device capable of exporting sFlow such as those from HP, Extreme, Foundary, Alcatel-Lucent and others.

NetFlow export versions 1, 5, 7 and 9 are supported, in addition to the emerging IPFIX standard (IP Flow Information eXport), sFlow, jFlow, cFlowd and NetStream (3Com). 

The NetFlow Performance Appliance
NetFlow Tracker software is installed on the Network Performance Appliance to expand the breadth,  depth and coverage of Visual Performance Manager by providing visibility into network flows for indepth  LAN/WAN and application troubleshooting, trend analysis and capacity planning. The hardened  Linux-based appliance improves performance for even the fastest circuits by collecting, storing and  analyzing the data before forwarding to a centralized database.

 

For more information on hardware requirements, view the NetFlow Tracker 6.0 release notes.

The retailer uses OptiView Management Suite to remotely manage over 800 locations, creating better visibility into savings opportunities.

Hot Topic retail stores are all about the music. The stores sell music, band t-shirts, and musicinfluenced clothes and accessories to teens and tweens. Customers can head into Hot Topic and find any kind of music genre at an in-store kiosk, be it country, rock, punk or something altogether alternative. Offering this service and keeping music choices current on a weekly basis while serving over 800 retail stores, with two brands, created a huge challenge for the technical services department. Network and application troubleshooting were nearly impossible, and a lack of accurate capacity planning meant stores were either under-served or over-served with bandwidth, affecting the customer experience and the company’s bottom line.

With Fluke Networks OptiView Management Suite in place, Hot Topic has been able to improve remote network troubleshooting, identify whether issues are network or application related, and reduce costs through better capacity planning.

Read Hot Topic Case Study

Baltic Investment Bank (Baltinvestbank) was born in December 1994 under the name of Baltoneksim Bank. In 2003 it was renamed and became known as Baltinvestbank. The Bank serves various large and medium-sized businesses in the North-West Federal District and other regions of Russia. Currently Baltinvestbank is a strategic business partner to many companies in the region. In 2006 the Bank was awarded the accolade of Best Bank in St. Petersburg for serving its businesses. Baltinvestbank has since introduced new services and opened new customer centers in St. Petersburg and other regions of Russia. The Bank’s highly qualified personnel provide clients with a high level of service and a complete range of banking products. Clients and partners value Baltinvestbank as a reliable, stable, and efficient bank offering an extensive and versatile product portfolio.

Built on Cisco hardware, Baltinvestbank’s network infrastructure is a geographically distributed multi-service WAN which has been rapidly grown over the past 3 years due to new subsidiary and branch offices opening. This rapid growth adversely affected network productivity and as a result, it was necessary for the Bank’s IT specialists to implement a new solution for the monitoring of their network traffic.

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BSS Group PLC is a plumbing and heating supply company based in the United Kingdom and Ireland. The critical issue for BSS revolved around response times. The Telnet-based sales order processing system imposes a low network overhead, with no real problems. Applications added later were adversely affecting the sales order processing system, which must operate correctly and in real time.

BSS bought a suite of NetFlow Tracker and NetWatch to provide information on WAN link status and network activity, initially to prioritize which sites needed upgrading first, then later to identify problems as they occur. “The real-time monitoring provided by the software allows us to monitor our core network infrastructure proactively. This monitoring alert facility brings to our attention network faults, allowing immediate response for investigation and fault analysis, often prior to our customers experiencing deterioration in their service.” - Richard Parkes, Senior IPT Technical Engineer, BSS Group

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Merchants Bank, a 35 location retail bank based in Vermont, USA, needed a better understanding of bandwidth on its 35-branch frame relay network, prior to the rollout of a centralized retail banking application.

The bank bought NetWatch and NetFlow Tracker to provide performance metrics and enable it to troubleshoot faults. After the evaluation, it was clear that NetFlow Tracker was the right tool for the job. NetFlow Tracker and NetWatch have continued to pay off in helping the team track down misbehaving applications.

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Micronas, a semi-conductor designer and manufacturer with worldwide operations based out of Germany, needed to monitor traffic on its WAN, which contained several lines under heavy load, principally from inter-site traffic in very large CAD files.

Initially, NetWatch seemed ideal. Although it could show where overloads were occurring, it could not help identify the cause. NetFlow Tracker was added to provide the necessary detail. “Through our experience with NetWatch, we came to NetFlow Tracker and immediately realized this was what we were looking for. We already knew about Cisco’s NetFlow technology, but without the right tool, we could not do much with it. As with NetWatch, we really liked NetFlow Tracker’s simplicity and user interface.” – Paul Blenderman, manager, Windows Systems and Infrastructure, Micronas

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With over 40,000 customers spread across ten states, the IT and network team at Murphy Hoffman Company, has its  work cut out to ensure the company’s network runs like a fine-oiled machine. The diverse network  supports services including sales, leasing, rental, refrigeration, body shop and support. In addition,  the networking team must manage a diverse architecture that includes both custom and commercial  off the shelf (COTS) software.

"When we turned on  NetFlow Tracker, we were  amazed of the level of  granularity and the custom  reporting options within the  software platform. For doing  our day-to day jobs with  network management, we  haven’t found a tool that  meets our needs any better  than NetFlow Tracker.”
– Ted Haubien,
MHC’s Sr. Systems Engineer

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MWB Business Exchange Plc (MWBEX) was formed in 1997 and is the United Kingdom’s second largest operator of serviced offices. Its current portfolio comprises 51 centers, providing 880,000 square feet of prime office, meeting and training room space. MWB centers are located in major cities, including Birmingham, Edinburgh, Leeds, Manchester, Milton Keynes, Nottingham, Oxford and the Thames Valley, with a core group of centers based in and around London.

MWB needed to see what was happening on its WAN and the LANs at its 51 sites around the United Kingdom to ensure that users were using their network properly and to monitor network performance.

MWB bought NetFlow Tracker and ResponseWatch to help monitor network performance and to determine when and where additional and expensive capacity might be required. “Thanks to the performance tuning our monitoring applications have helped us achieve, we now only need to look at them daily when one of the sites alerts us that a customer is complaining of slow service.” – Mike Michael, technical support manager, MWB Business Exchange.

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Patrick is a transport and logistics company, specializing in the loading and unloading of ships and the efficient land-based collection, distribution and storage of cargo for import and export within Australia. Patrick is Australia’s largest operator of container terminals, with state-of-the-art facilities in all major ports. The company has built an integrated network of freight and logistics operations that deliver seamless and efficient transport solutions by rail, road, sea and air.

Ongoing acquisitions mean the IT network is an ever-changing map, as non-standard systems are brought into the infrastructure. Keeping up with this fast pace is an ongoing challenge for the technical services department at Patrick.

Seeking a better understanding of network activity, the technical services team first bought ResponseWatch and NetFlow Tracker. The NetFlow and IPSLA applications proactively monitor and troubleshoot application response and help to define internal service level agreements to ensure smooth business application service.

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PROTEK Innovation Centre is a national distributor operating in all 83 constituents of Russia. Their regional network consists of 37 branches (and warehouses), 34 regional trade offices and 26 storage depots. All company offices are connected by a single corporatetelecommunication network using VoIP Telephony based on Cisco technology. PROTEK Innovation Centre partners with 860 leading pharmaceutical producers from 46 countries worldwide. PROTEK’s product range includes over 14,500 pharmaceutical medicines and has the largest product sales mix among Russian distributors. PROTEK is in the TOP-10 of pharmaceutical distributors worldwide.

The company’s customer base covers all sectors of the pharmaceutical market: individual pharmacies, pharmacy chains, medical and prevention institutions, wholesale companies, other organizations part of the ONLS Program (provision of essential drugs). PROTEK’s network infrastructure is geographically distributed, with many remote and multisite locations. PROTEK needed to have visibility into who was using the network and how it was being used between these remote locations. The required solution needed to show detailed reporting and analysis of all users and network service activities both long term (up to 1 year) and short term (‘on the spot’ visibility). An additional requirement by

PROTEK was that the solution must be user friendly and easy to install.

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The Turk Ekonomi Bankası (TEB), with headquarters in Istanbul, has over 300 branches across Turkey ranging in size from 15 to 50 users per site and approximately 5000+ users company-wide. The bank runs a multi-site Cisco network with two links, one running to their headquarters and one redundant link running to the Recovery Centre. Across this network, TEB runs various applications from Windows based machines, the most critical being an in-house developed banking application. Every user within the organization accesses the application in the data center across a WAN connection. The most common issue TEB faced was slow WAN links. The result of those slow connections meant users regularly complained about slow performance and limited or no access to business critical applications. Access failures were related to timeouts that would occur if the application servers didn’t respond within the timeout window. Historically TEB had to troubleshoot all IT issues manually using a command line interface which proved to be a very time consuming and cumbersome process.

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