Blog Post

Network Monitoring With Netflow


May 28, 2016

We’re back with another edition of our monthly newsletter for customers, partners, and anyone interested in GroundWork’s monitoring technologies. May has been a busy month for us following up interest in our monitoring solution after OpenStack Summit. We learned a lot, and we’re preparing some new treats for our customers who use OpenStack and need to improve their monitoring. Look for updates this summer! We also wanted to let you know what events we will be at this summer (is it almost June already?), and to talk a little bit about the kinds of monitoring technology we are integrating.

Red Hat Summit 2016 | San Francisco | June 27–July 1

Want to join us at Red Hat Summit? GroundWork customers can register at a discounted rate of $995 (that’s a $500 savings off the regular registration rate!). We’ll be there at BOOTH 211 with casino games and prizes. Come by and win, or ask us for a demonstration of GroundWork Monitor’s latest capabilities and win bigger! Register here with discount code GROUNDWORK995.

Openstack Silicon Valley 2016 | Mountain View | Aug 9–10

We’re also an Openstack Silicon Valley sponsor at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California. OpenStack Silicon Valley presents front-line use cases from organizations who are changing processes to embrace devops and other agile methods, using open cloud infrastructure.

Industry Trends: Netflow/Sflow and nfdump

One of the pleasures of working in Open Source is to see how many innovative projects there actually are out there, and how elegantly the community is solving long-standing problems. Monitoring is a really big issue, and Network Monitoring with netflow/sflow has been a concern for some customers for a long time.

While you could set up the NTOP instance as a netflow collector and see stats, there hasn’t been an easy way to generate alerts from issues detected in netflow/sflow in GroundWork. So, we decided to ask our community what would work, and Remo Rickli, author of NeDi (Network discovery bundled in GroundWork) found a way to use nfdump (http://nfdump.sourceforge.net) to set thresholds on netflow conditions, like traffic spikes (or loss of traffic), and to send alerts based on thresholds being passed.

We are now looking at passing the data into GroundWork so we can include it in our dashboards, graphs and displays, just like data from Nagios(tm) icinga2, and cacti. Just one of the many new things we are doing to help our customers use open course tools in a unified, supported way. We expect to get all this functionality and more into GroundWork by the 4th quarter of 2016.

 

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