Flow Monitor settings

The Flow Monitor Settings dialog provides general settings, data retention, and data management settings used to configure and manage Flow Monitor.

Flow Monitor Settings

General

Note: If you configure Flow Monitor to listen on more than one port, or on a port other than the default port, you should verify that the port is not being used by another service. Additionally, if you are using Windows Firewall, ensure that an exception is added to the firewall.

Note: If you select the Get favorite icons option, Flow Monitor makes connections to a host in the domain to retrieve the favicon. This impacts the connections statistics for both the host and the domain.

Report Data

Important: Be cautious about increasing the time for Expire unclassified traffic after value because the database can grow very large as the time is increased.

Note: The collector will purge any unclassified data that has no activity after the Expire unclassified traffic after value is satisfied.

You can use the data retention section of the Flow Monitor Settings dialog to set data retention parameters for flow and interface data. Periodic roll-up and archival of flow data minimizes system resources needed for data storage and improves system responsive during data intensive operations.

Data retention settings

Flow data includes many parameters (input and output interfaces, source and destination IP addresses, port numbers, byte rates, flow end times, etc.) which while useful in providing information may quickly fill available storage. Rolling up the data makes for efficient storage, but there may be losses of time related information within individual flows. Flow Monitor provides a data retention scheme that allows the user to choose to either manually tune data retention or to allow Flow Monitor to automatically tune the retention of flow data, which in turn actively manages the growth rate of the Flow Monitor databases. The following parameters are used to control the cleanup of flow data.

Interface Data Retention Settings

Raw interface data is provided by the flow collector, or the collector can be configured to collect raw interface data directly from the network device when the collector is receiving sampled flow data. This raw interface data is used to represent total interface traffic for the period and to calculate 95th percentile values for the Interface Overview and Interface Usage reports. Because of the data compaction, interface data has a smaller impact on data storage, so it can be maintained for longer periods of time.

The following parameters are used to control the clean up of interface data.

Click OK to save changes.

See Also

Managing Flow Monitor Settings

Configure Flow Monitor to listen for NetFlow data

Setting the logging level

Data retention strategy and tuning

Configuring data retention settings