With the cloud services market growing to $176 billion by 2015, you can bet that changes in business services will cause the IT guys to pay more attention to what is chewing up bandwidth on company Internet connections. I'm not just talking about who or what applications, I'm talking about performance monitoring as in what's the end user experience (i.e. is it slow)?
Using NetFlow for network traffic monitoring is a mature market with dozens of vendors to choose from and anyone of them can display the top talkers, applications, protocols, etc. What sets them apart today is the ability to work with Flexible NetFlow and IPFIX to display details being exported in today's Flow technologies. I'm talking about latency per TCP connection as well as jitter and packet loss for VoIP and video traffic. If your company depends on cloud services such as Salesforce.com or Skype, how do you monitor for optimal performance?
If you don't have a Cisco router that supports Flexible NetFlow, pick-up my nBox and gain insight into details such as codec, call ID and even URLs. The market for cloud monitoring tools is starting to grow so don't be limited to traditional NetFlow network monitoring solutions. And remember, when you need to configure Flexible NetFlow on Cisco hardware, my video tutorial may help, as this ain't no "ip route-cache flow" technology.
