Bring your own device (BYOD) is a corporate megatrend that has IT staff scrambling to adapt and adjust to. One tool that is underutilized when it comes to planning and operating in the brave new BYOD environment is flexible NetFlow.

“The application awareness that is possible via NetFlow, IPFIX and similar flow records can be of great value to network and infrastructure operations,” said Jim Frey, managing research director for Enterprise Management Associates, in a recent statement. “And yet, a surprising number of organizations have yet to leverage this source of operational intelligence.”

Frey moderated a panel last week at Interop (News - Alert) 2012 in New York that addressed the many choices facing network managers as they deal with BYOD and the modern network landscape. One of the panelists at the session was Plixer International’s Chief Security Officer, Adam Powers, whose company Frey praised for providing tools to help serve the modern network admin.

“Plixer is a great example of a management tools provider that, while continuing to push the envelope and get the maximum possible value out of flow records via their Scrutinizer product, has focused on providing a solution that is simple to deploy and within financial reach of organizations of most any size,” Frey added.

Scrutinizer provides detailed network utilization reports showing the applications and users generating network traffic. Using traffic meta-data from Netflow and IPFIX, even sites with secured connections that use encrypted traffic are factored into the product’s reporting and insights.

Among the features of Scrutinizer are flow analytics, cross checks, multi-tenancy, deep packet inspection, advanced reports, failover and flow replication, among others. Scrutinizer is available as an appliance, download or virtual machine.

According to the company, Scrutinizer is designed to peer deep into network traffic, letting IT admins easily see who is consuming bandwidth as well as what they are using it for, and instantly restore the resources for work-related needs.

This ability to closely analyze everything taking place within the network and suss out traffic uses is helpful with BYOD because the network can then prioritize certain BYOD data streams over others—such as VoIP or mission-critical data streams.

“There are many uses for NetFlow that often go unrecognized,” noted Plixer’s Powers. “Visibility is key to proper network management and security monitoring. NetFlow is the visibility enabler.”

Netflow is the industry-standard IP traffic information protocol originally developed by Cisco (News - Alert) and now used globally.