As the holiday season rapidly approaches, a gift any company can surely benefit from is the flexible and highly intuitive offering referred to as NetFlow. The latest version of this impressive solution, version 10, was released about a month ago and includes features such as a Report Designer, mapping and IP groups.

While the mapping functionality allows for multiple connections from the same device to run simultaneously alongside animated links, IP Groups make it easy to view every action taking place within a variety of IP addresses. This in turn drives much better network traffic analysis functionality. Looking specifically at the Report Designer, it can “bring any machine generated messages including syslogs and even Microsoft (News - Alert) event logs into Scrutinizer as IPFIX for correlation, threat pattern matching and reporting. Combined with IPFIXify, it can aid as a log management solution,” according to a company blog post. In addition, newly added virtual and hardware appliances can be leveraged in order to support higher flow volumes and an alternative to a windows install.

For those not in the know about how beneficial this tool really is to operations overall, Plixer will be holding a webinar titled, “VMware ESX Traffic Monitoring and Threat Detection” on Thursday, November 29^th at 10:00 a.m. and again at 4:00 p.m. EDT. According to Michael Patterson (News - Alert), CEO of Plixer International, the factors that ultimately led the NetFlow provider to decide to host the event include:

·         "Spending on x86 server and desktop virtualization software technologies is forecasted to grow at a 23.7 percent compound annual growth rate through 2014. The market is driven by organizations looking to lower total cost of ownership and increase overall IT effectiveness," predicted by Alan Dayley, Gartner.

·         "More than 23 percent of all servers shipped in 2014 will be actively supporting virtual machine technology and more than 70 percent of all server workloads installed on new shipments in 2014 will reside in a virtual machine," the IDC (News - Alert) added.

·         “According to Forrester Consulting, in 2013, 74 percent of x86 server OS instances will be operating as virtual servers rather than directly on server hardware.“

Every company that has VMware deployed is interested in learning more about the traffic patterns to and from the servers. Thus, firms in every industry could stand to take advantage of the information gained during this event such as application performance baselines with latency and packet loss metrics, monitoring and reporting cloud services on the users experiencing poor connection times, information availability natively from the ESX core package, monitoring to ensure virtual applications/workloads are isolated from one another, securing multitenant virtual environments, and tips for ESX server monitoring in vSwitch and Cisco (News - Alert) Nexus 1000v environment, a company statement revealed.

For a business not currently utilizing a network intelligence tool such as NetFlow, it would be wise to implement one immediately as “NetFlow / IPFIX is currently the only option for monitoring the traffic as technologies like packet capture do not work with vMotio,” Patterson added.

In the not so distant future, the flexible and reliable offering will be demonstrating latency, packet loss, retransmits, etc. that are supported in some VMware environments in addition to the ability to export ESX server syslogs as IPFIX and the value obtained by correlating it with NetFlow.

To attend the webcast in its entirety, click here or here.

Want to learn more about the latest in communications and technology? Then be sure to attend ITEXPO Miami 2013, Jan 29- Feb. 1 in Miami, Florida.  Stay in touch with everything happening at ITEXPO (News - Alert). Follow us on Twitter.