Until 2012, NetFlow Analyzer’s Enterprise edition benefited ISPs, MSPs and large organizations that had distributed network architecture, in monitoring their bandwidth.

Any organization with less than 600 interfaces and want to monitor all of them by installing product on Head Quarters data center can go with Professional and Professional Plus Edition which has integrated collectors and reporting engine which collects the data and generate reports.

The Enterprise edition was majorly used by organizations that had a distributed architecture and monitoring was done by means of Central server and multiple collectors across different sites in the same network.

Limitation of Enterprise Edition:-

• Unavailability of all the features of the Professional & Professional Plus editions due to architecture-based differences

• Bandwidth issues that arise when transporting data from collectors to the Central server

What the new Distributed edition solves:-

We have introduced our new distributed architecture which is a enhanced version with similar architecture to the Enterprise edition that was available earlier. A difference is that the distributed edition has collectors which collect the data and store the data in its local database itself.

The central reporting server which communicates with collectors and integrates all the collectors in one single UI and management of all the collectors can be done from central reporting server UI itself, that is Schedule report creation, alert configuration, IP groups, Device groups, IP SLA etc.

Advantages of Distributed Edition :-

• Since collector stores all the collected data in its local database, the bandwidth utilized between central server and collector is very less .
• Scalability is very high.
• All the features of Professional and Professional Plus is available.
• Single installable file for Collectors and central server(User has option to select which one to install during the installation).

Architecture:

The distributed edition architecture is as shown in below diagram:

Central Reporting Server:-

The Central reporting server has to be deployed first and it acts as a global console in distributed edition which reports on all the devices from collectors and generate reports. It can also be called as management server, where one can administer all the collectors from the central reporting server itself.

Administrator can create users (Guest and Operators) in the central server with their respective time zone and allow them for access to Device Groups, IP groups, Interface groups etc.

Collector Server :-

The collector server has to be deployed after central reporting server is installed and started. The collector uses HTTPS connection to contact central reporting server. During the installation of collector, we have to specify the central server IP and HTTPS port on which central server is running so that collector communicates automatically with central reporting server once it is installed and started.

The users can generate reports in the collector UI also, they can also create users(Guest and Operator) with respective time zones and assign them for access to Device Groups, IP groups, Interface groups etc.

We as a NetFlow Analyzer team always thinking of improvement in product feature architecture and we expect this distributed edition can solve many ISP’s , MSP’s and Corporate need for bandwidth monitoring with its high end feature list and scalability.

Click here to know the features available with distributed edition and click Download to install the product on your network to evaluate its capability.

 

Praveen Kumar

NetFlow Analyzer Technical Team

 

You Can Learn More About the ManageEngine Product Line By Going to manageengine.optrics.com

The original article/video can be found at All New Distributed Edition of NetFlow Analyzer