Noction Flow Analyzer is a flow-based monitoring and reporting software that collects, stores and presents traffic data across the entire network and protocols to network professionals for future analysis. The product enables engineers to optimize their networks and applications performance, control bandwidth utilization, do the proper network capacity planning, perform detailed BGP peering analysis, improve security and minimize network incidents response time.
Noction Flow Analyzer supports NetFlow, J-Flow, sFlow, IPFIX, NetStream as well as BGP.
NFA is currently in Open Beta and is offered free of charge. Once officially launched, it will be priced per license at a flat rate of $299/month with no limitations in terms of network devices, interfaces or sites added to the system; free 24/7 support available.
Custom pricing will apply to deployments with over 10K FPS.
Currently, NFA is in Open Beta and for the duration of the beta, it will be completely free to use.
No, you will not have to reinstall or shut down the server. You’ll need to simply introduce the new license activation code under Management > License
- x86_64 architecture
- Minimum 4x core CPU (8x core CPU recommended)
- Minimum 32GB of RAM (64GB RAM recommended; 128GB RAM – optimal)
- Minimum 250GB SSD storage (500GB SSD storage recommended) allocated to the /var partition
Software Requirements:
- CentOS 7 x86_64 Minimal or CentOS 8 x86_64 Minimal – Clean Install
or
- Ubuntu 20.04 LTS
| Note: NFA will install and operate below the recommended system requirements. However, as the database size grows and if complex queries are used, this can result in slow performance. |
The minimum system requirements assume default configuration. Significantly increasing the flow collection rate might cause additional load on a server, thus requiring extra memory or a larger CPU.
Run any query using NFA Data Explorer, save your query as a widget and add it to a dashboard of your choice.
You can save your query in a Query Library for subsequent use. Browse the library of Saved queries in order to start from a typical configuration. Export query results for further processing outside of Noction Flow Analyzer.
NFA overcomes the limitation of BGP support in traditional NetFlow. It employs a collection of full BGP data from BGP tables of edge routers and extracting the required BGP attributes from the tables. NFA extracts BGP attributes such as AS_PATH and matches the obtained data with a corresponding flow record. This enables NFA to see and filter on the full BGP path, not just the next hop, first three or last three AS numbers.
Enabling BGP data will require you to establish a BGP session between at least one of your routers and NFA.
Yes. You may cancel your subscription at any time. No questions asked.
You’ll be able to continue using NFA until the end of your billing cycle.
An IP Flow is a sequence of packets sharing the same properties that are sent between a sending and receiving hosts. For instance, when we watch live streaming video, packets sent from server to PC create a flow as they are part of the same conversation.
NetFlow is a Cisco proprietary network protocol used for flow analysis. NetFlow collects and aggregates information about network traffic flowing through a device with an enabled NetFlow feature. The outputs of NetFlow are flow records that are sent to a centralized place in a network (flow collector) as NetFlow messages. There are multiple NetFlow protocol versions, with the most important ones being versions 5 and 9. Version 5 is most common on Cisco NetFlow enabled devices.
Although sFlow stands for Sampled Flow, actual packets are being sampled here instead of flows. Sampling involves either copying headers of packets or extracting features from a packet. The goal of packet sampling and filtering is to forward only certain packets. Based on a defined sampling rate, an average of 1 out of n packets is randomly sampled. sFlow agent running within a router or a switch packages interface counters and flow samples into sFlow datagrams. The datagrams are continuously sent using UDP to Noction Flow Analyzer where they are further analyzed.
Internet Protocol Flow Information Export (IPFIX) is a standard for exporting the information about network flows from devices. It is derived from Cisco’s proprietary NetFlow v9. A metering process generates flow records collecting data packets at an Observation Point, filters them and aggregates information about these packets. Flow records are sent by the Exporting process running on exporter as IPFIX messages encapsulated by layer 4 protocols (SCTP, UDP or TCP) to NFA.
IPFIX can be used to export any traffic information from L2-L7 to NFA. It is a flexible protocol that supports variable length fields. It allows collecting information such as http URL or host (e.g. facebook.com) as well as the user-defined data types.