What is Integrated Flow Analyzer?

Introduction

What can you identify with flow collection?

Who has access to flow data?

To access flow information and functionality

Flow data retention

RESTful API

Introduction:

Entuity Integrated Flow Analyzer integrates flow-based performance data alongside Entuity's elemental performance data.

Note, with the correct license, you can have access to Integrated Flow Analyzer Premium, which provides increased functionality.

What can you identify with flow collection?

• network congestion.
• applications consuming high bandwidth percentages.
• destination of network traffic.

Data can be collected and stored with a granularity of 5 minutes, and is retained for one month. Flow data is collected from its own local collector. Data is stored in a compressed form, but can also be stored in an uncompressed form by disabling de-ephemeralization.

On a high specification dedicated flow collector, Entuity can support 100,000 flows per second.

Who has access to flow data?

Members of the Administrators user group have full access to flow collection and data functionality.

You must explicitly assign other user groups flow permissions through the Flow Inspection permission. This enables users to:

• view flow data.
• start and stop flow collection.
• generate interactive charts.
• access flow data when creating reports.

However, the Flow Inspection permission does not allow users to:

• run the Flow Health report.
• assign flow collectors to master flow collectors.

To access flow information and functionality:

There are three ways you can access flow information:

• Via the Flow Inventory page in Administration.
• Via the Application Port Mappings page in Administration.
• Via the Flow dashboard or a custom dashboard containing flow dashlets.

Flow data retention:

Flows generate a large amount of data, for which Entuity uses four levels of data rollup. By default, IFA retains:

• 5 minute samples for 2 hours.
• hourly samples for 24 hours.
• 6-hourly samples for 7 days.
• daily samples for 35 days, although access to a maximum of 31 days is available through the UI.

When you query data, Entuity uses the most appropriate data sample, e.g. hourly data is accessible when the requested time period is less than one day.

Users with the Flow Inspection permission have access to all collected flow data, including data from interfaces to which they otherwise do not have access in Entuity.

RESTful API:

Please see the following for help and information on managing flow via Entuity RESTful API:

• List network devices for which flow is being collected and stored, and flow history for a specified device.
• List the applications currently configured to support flow.
• List time series by flow data, grouped and filtered according to query parameters.