Reducing the Netflow database

Netflow database usage is largely determined by the number of flows received from your flow-enabled devices and the data retention settings for the WhatsUp Gold Flow Monitor plug-in. To reduce the amount of space needed by Flow Monitor, consider the following changes:

1. Change the Report Data settings on the Flow Monitor Settings dialog (On the Flow Monitor section of the GO menu, select Configure > Setting). On this dialog you can modify the raw, hourly, and daily roll-up settings.

   By default, the Flow Monitor keeps data for a little over 4 days before archiving it to the NfArchive database. For most of our customers, these default settings are fine. But, if you have changed your retention settings to larger values or are receiving a large number of flows from your sources, your database may grow large.

   The default Report Data settings are:

   • Data collection interval - 2 minutes
   • Roll up raw data after - 4 hours
   • Roll up hourly data after - 1 day
   • Archive daily data after - 3 days
   • Expire archive data after - 7 days
   • Resolve private address interval - 48 hours
   • Resolve public address interval - 720 hours
   • Expire unclassified traffic after - 0 hours
2. Reduce/Disable unclassified traffic.

   If you are retaining information on unclassified traffic, consider reducing the amount of time that data is kept. By default, Flow Monitor ignores flow information for applications and protocols not configured in WhatsUp. You can enable Flow monitor to begin monitoring this traffic, but if you receive a large volume of unclassified traffic, or keep the traffic for a long period of time, this can cause the database to grow large.

   You should also consider creating new applications for the specific traffic on your network so that the information can be classified.

   For more information, see Monitoring traffic on non-standard ports and Classifying traffic that is considered unclassified.

3. Migrate to SQL edition with larger capacity.

   If the above steps are not enough to reduce the database size or your environment is large enough, you may need to move from the SQL Server Express Edition instance shipped with WhatsUp Gold to a SQL version with larger size capacity such as SQL Standard or SQL Enterprise. Information in migrating from the default WHATSUP instance of SQL Server to another SQL instance can be found in the WhatsUp Gold Database Migration and Management Guide on the WhatsUp Gold web site.