Designing Cisco Netflow Architecture ?

[smokeybear]

My company isn't using a management system for analyzing the WAN traffic and we want to implement Cisco Netflow to analyse the network traffic on the backbone. We have a huge network with more then 100 sites across the world. We use 120x 2600 routers and 6x 7200 routers.

Now the question is : How to collect the data into a central place ?

The routers have netflow activated and they send the netflow information to a netflow collector. Now we need a program that collects the data from the netflow collectors to a central place and analyzes this. I searched the cisco site and found out that cisco uses a Netflow server for that solution. But Cisco has decided to partner with third-party vendors to deliver the Netflow Server product.

Does Anybody have any ideas ?

[michael.kopp]

Hi

if I understand you correctly you need some application to make your netflow data human viewable , right ?

Take a look at this page, it is a very good listing of different vendors which deliever such products, also some freeware projects are listed ...

http://www.switch.ch/tf-tant/floma/software.html

here is a additional listing

http://www.inmon.com/technology/netflowapps.php

Michael

[smokeybear]

Thanks michael.kopp for your reaction. I found some very usefull tools on the links you gave me.

Now there is one more thing that i'm wondering about

Is there a correct way to calculate the bandwidth usage of netflow ? The problem is that we need to brind the netflow information to a central place. So from america to europe and from asia to europe. But we don't want to have to much extra backbone traffic. is there a good way to calculate the extra traffic that netflow produces ?

[michael.kopp]

Hi,

there is no exact way to calculate the bandwidth you will need for the additional netflow data transport. It depends, how the traffic behaves in your netework, does it consist of a huge amount of short transactions, or are there many long term transactions, which will result in less netflow data to export. I all my customer networks we saw less than 0.5 to 1 percent of traffic for netflow.

If you want more information, or maybe a test of our netflow tool (we are also on this lists - IsarFlow) contact me offline michael.kopp@gmx.net

Michael