If somebody, as they say, has "taken many calls" about something, it's a good bet they know something about it.That's the case with Scott R., blogger for Systrax, who wrote recently that he's been working a lot with NetFlow's traffic monitoring functionality, especially as it relates to the Cisco (News - Alert) Catalyst 6500 switch.

And with the introduction of "Flexible NetFlow," Scott says, the flow technology can move forward to power more advanced functions, such as NetFlow analysis and reporting.

In what Scott calls good news, The Supervisor Engine 2T now supports Flexible NetFlow to the Cisco Catalyst 6500 Series switch, which means, among other uses, a user can create simultaneous and separate Flow Monitors for security analysis and traffic analysis. You couldn't do this in previous generations of Supervisors for the Cisco Catalyst 6500 series; however with this new solution is offers a much higher degree of flexibility.

So, if you're running Supervisor Engine 2T on your Catalyst 6500, you can use more scalable reporting options from Flexible NetFlow, and monitor all traffic, "assign different flow monitoring parameters to different interfaces, and take advantage of Cisco’s latest flow export technologies," such as Cisco TrustSec (CTS (News - Alert)) support.

Those are just some of the highlighted features. TMC blogger Michael Patterson (News - Alert) added in a post that Flexible NetFlow doesn't use the command IP route-cache flow when it comes to monitoring cloud services. In that case, you need to run IOS 15.2(2)T or more recent versions for the most capable Flexible NetFlow exports. The latest version, Cisco IP SLA, provides more network latency details than ever before.

Additionally, Cisco Performance Routing (PfR) can export IP SLA details with Flexible NetFlow. "When a router determines that a connection is a bit? congested, it will evaluate existing flows and reroute traffic over different connections ensuring priority to time sensitive traffic," Patterson revealed.