Cloud Monitoring Tools – NetFlow

May 16, 2011 by
Filed under: IPFIX, NetFlow 

On Friday May 6th I listened to Orlando Ayala during the MIT Sloan Sales Conference where he announced that Microsoft would be making a big play in the Cloud Services market.  Two business days later Microsoft buys Skype for $8.5 Billion.

Orlando Ayala Cloud Services

Orlando Ayala

Corporate Vice President, Chairman Emerging Markets, Chief Advisor to the COO
Microsoft


The acquisition of Skype allows Microsoft to play in the enterprise collaboration market, relationships with carriers and possible add-ons to the Windows Mobile operating system. Combined with its investment in facebook.com, Skype helps Microsoft compete against Google and Apple.

What does the emerging cloud market mean to NetFlow and IPFIX?  What new information will we need to make sure our businesses service levels are being met?  A new type of NetFlow is already available for this technology evolution.

In order to cut costs, more and more companies are outsourcing applications to cloud service providers. Some of these companies call us to find out what cloud monitoring service or cloud monitoring tools we offer to verify service levels.  Monitoring cloud applications will require additional traffic details from your IPFIX and NetFlow exports. Citrix AppFlow, Enterasys, Juniper, nProbe, SonicWALL and others are already exporting MAC addresses using IPFIX.  Cisco does it with NetFlow v9 and Flexible NetFlow. MAC Address is one way we can track internal mobile devices connecting to internet resources, but this is not enough in the cloud services monitoring market.

Cloud-based network monitoring needs to track latency. The nProbe from Luca Deri was the first solution to use TCP flags when measuring application, client and server latency including URLs. It does this by observing TCP handshakes and then exports the data using IPFIX. Cisco was next with Performance Monitoring for medianets followed by SonicWALL and now Citrix NetScaler has followed suit. Plixer is the first company to offer reporting on these new NetFlow and IPFIX exports and offers a white paper titled Measuring Latency Using NetFlow that is worth a read. These companies are the innovators in monitoring cloud performance with flow data.

These new flow exports bring the following to cloud Performance monitoring:

  • Clear understanding on client, server or application side latency
  • Developers gain insight into how software changes impact application performance
  • Customers can trend baselines on services and set acceptable thresholds
  • A high degree of granularity in end user and subnet monitoring
  • Ability to report on specific time frames for targeted URLs and the impacted end systems

If you are looking to monitor cloud services, what information would you like to see NetFlow and IPFIX gather?

~Angela
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Related posts:

  1. Latency Service Levels from the Cloud
  2. Latency using NetFlow from the nProbe- Part 1
  3. Use the nProbe and NetFlow to Monitor Network Latency
  4. NetFlow Domain Reporting: Part 1
  5. Latency using NetFlow from the nProbe- Part 2

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Comments

  • http://www.plixer.com/blog/general/voip-netflow-monitoring/ VoIP NetFlow Monitoring – NetFlow & sFlow Network Monitoring – Systrax

    [...] service. So again , having a product that can monitor VoIP traffic AND Cloud computing is huge! A cloud monitoring tool will allow you to report on traffic that comes in and out of cloud based [...]

  • http://www.plixer.com/blog/general/cascade-flow-adds-latency-to-netflow/ Cascade Flow adds Latency to NetFlow – NetFlow & sFlow Network Monitoring – Systrax

    [...] Cascade Flow adds Latency to NetFlow Posted in General, IPFIX, IT News, NetFlow, NetFlow Analyzer, Scrutinizer on June 11th, 2011 by jimmyd var fbShare = {url: 'http://www.plixer.com/blog/general/cascade-flow-adds-latency-to-netflow/',size: 'large',}I’m told that Riverbed® Cascade® Flow has introduced latency metrics to their NetFlow exports.  With this new information, we can possibly report on latency between hosts, application latency and even latency involving services in the cloud (i.e. Monitoring Cloud Performance). [...]