NetScout last week unveiled an appliance designed to track traffic data across enterprise networks and help IT managers better understand how their business applications use network resources.

NetScout introduced nGenius Flow Collector, a high-density appliance dedicated to collecting NetFlow data from up to 1,000 NetFlow-enabled interfaces. Industry watchers say NetFlow is becoming a more important option for enterprise customers looking to measure and manage the impact of application services on infrastructure.

"NetFlow offers significant value for performance management, capacity planning, and security across the networked application infrastructure," wrote Dennis Drogseth, vice president at Enterprise Management Associates in a newsletter: http://www.nwfusion.com/newsletters/nsm/2003/0825nsm1.html

By collecting NetFlow data from Cisco gear, network managers can get a handle on the busiest of business applications. NetFlow is a data export format that views router traffic statistics on a per-flow basis. The data can give network managers an idea of what applications are talking to each other most and which business units are consuming the most IT resources, such as bandwidth. For example, administrators who know how many packets and bytes are sent to and from certain IP addresses or across specific network interfaces can create usage-based departmental charge-back systems. The data can also be used to traffic-engineer networks for optimum performance. 

Used in combination with nGenius Performance Manager, Flow Collector can display application-level conversation details either in real-time or in automated daily, weekly, or monthly reports. The reports provide analysis on application use across NetFlow-enabled routers and switches for improving traffic engineering and capacity planning for enterprises and government agencies.

NGenius Performance Manager runs on a server and communicates with the hardware probes to collect application and traffic data. The software also can poll devices and servers to collect performance metrics. In this release NetScout will offer the software in a packaged appliance.

NGenius Performance Manager costs about $50,000, and nGenius Flow Collector costs $15,000.

Ann Bednarz is associate news editor at Network World.