Chapter 3. Getting Started

Installation and configuration of Caligare Flow Inspector is simple. This section addresses the few essential steps required to collect and display the NetFlow information from your network. More detail for each step is available in subsequent sections of this manual.

  1. Set up NetFlow Data Export (NDE) on your router(s) or L3/L4 switch(es). Appendix A, Configuring NetFlow Data Export gives a quick guide on setting up NetFlow Data Export on NetFlow compatible devices.
    • For more information on this, refer to your router documentation, or go to the URL: http://www.cisco.com/go/netflow.
    • Set the destination of the NetFlow traffic to the IP address of the NetFlow collector workstation.
  2. Install NetFlow monitoring software on the workstation as shown in the Chapter 2, Installation.
  3. You can access the web-based interface of Caligare Flow Inspector using a web browser. For access to web interface use the following address: http://<your_webserver>/netflow, <your_webserver> is the IP address or hostname of the web server where NetFlow web part is installed.
  4. Log into system using username admin and password nfadmin and select Options menu.
  5. Most of the configuration defaults will allow you to start collecting data, but there are some items that require setup:
    • Device settings: When a router or switch sends NetFlow Data Exports to the monitor it is important to setup the IP address and SNMP community string for resolving interface names. This step is necessary in case, the devices send data to the collectors, which are all listening on the same port. It's recommended using read-only SNMP community for security reasons.
    • Collector settings: Add new collector. It's recommended using standalone collector for each router. When creating a new collector select the unit (server) on which you want it to run, listening port (e.g. 2000), number of hourly tables which will be stored (e.g. 32), number of daily tables (e.g. 31), number of weekly tables (e.g. 4) and number of monthly tables (e.g. 3). Don't forget to enable collector.
    • Advanced parameters can't be modified later! You can choose aggregation steps and which items you want to store in the hourly, daily, weekly or monthly tables. You can select the format of stored data and which categories you want to store (e.g. source IP, destination IP). Properly formatting the tables helps save disk space, because you can limit which items are able to be viewed and stored.
    • License settings: If you have received a full license with this product, it should be loaded via menu "Help->License Key". This product can't run without license key. See web pages download section for getting trial version key.
  6. Minimum configuration is now complete. For more configuration information, read the Chapter 4, Configuration. Graphs will be available in seconds after starting Caligare Flow Inspector software. After successfully login click on menu "Options" for configuration or menu "Data->Trends" for view graphs.