What’s new on our Netflow Monitoring Feature for Xian Network Manager 2012 SP2?

Jalasoft is proud to announce the upcoming release of service pack 2 for Xian Network Manager 2012. Among all the new features and improvements that will be present in SP2, we can highlight several enhancements on the side of Netflow monitoring:

Support for Netflow version 9:

Xian NM can now properly receive and process Netflow traffic from any device that has Netflow version 9 enabled. Xian NM will automatically detect the version and the packets structures, including any custom one, from any V9 templates to obtain the fields and values that can be used to filter data and generate alerts and counters for OpsMgr.

Additionally, Xian NM will still accept Netflow V5 data which will be also automatically detected and accepted. 

Dashboards:

You can now create an OpsMgr dashboard that contains performance graphs from the top N elements associated to a default or custom filter. For example, this will allow you to create a filter to monitor YouTube traffic and another to monitor Facebook; you can then generate a management pack that, when imported into OpsMgr, will create a dashboard with 2 widgets containing the traffic performance graphs of the top 10 computers for each website.

In other words, you will be able to create automatic dashboards for each Xian NM filter monitoring your Netflow.

Monitoring of Top N elements:

It is very possible that a scenario may develop where Xian NM needs to monitor many IP addresses or elements through our Netflow feature. This means that each of these elements will be registered in OpsMgr, which in turn may result in many objects visible in the OpsMgr console. To avoid this problem, you can define the top N elements that will be sent to OpsMgr. For example, instead of sending 150 IP addresses to OpsMgr, you can configure Xian NM to only register the 10 IP addresses that have most of the traffic. This list will be automatically adjusted so new elements will be added and old ones removed.

Sampling:

Another new feature in Xian NM 2012 SP2 is Netflow sampling. This aspect lets you chose if all the Netflow packets received from the devices sending their data to Xian NM will be accepted and processed or only a configured percentage. This greatly improves performance and allows Xian NM to receive Netflow packets from many sources.