Set Up Flow Detail Records

Your PacketShaper offers a Flow Detail Record (FDR) feature that lets you track the connections that occur between devices in your local network and remote IP addresses. Using FDR you can drill down to detailed information based on individual host IP addresses.

To use Flow Detail Records you must:

Impact on Collection Agents

The volume of FDR data produced by a PacketShaper can be very great, depending on a number of factors such as:

• The number of unique host IP addresses in your network
• The number of unique remote IP addresses connected to by your local hosts
• The number of different protocols in use
• The amount of network activity in terms of uniquely identifiable flows

Even in a small network with few PacketShapers the volume of FDR data may be quite large. Consider creating one or more Remote Collection Agents that will be used exclusively for FDR collection. Each Collection Agent processes the FDR data by writing it into tables in an Oracle database, then pushes this organized and compacted data to the ReportCenter Report Server. See Flow Detail Records Overview for more details.

Procedures

The pages linked below provide step by step instructions for configuring ReportCenter and your PacketShapers to support FDR.

• Set Up PacketShapers for Flow Detail Records
• Set Up ReportCenter for Flow Detail Records

View Reports

1. Connect to ReportCenter with a web browser.
2. Click Reports in the navigation bar.
3. Use the left-most drop-down to select Network.
4. Use the next drop-down to select Host.
5. Use the third drop-down to select a specific type of FDR report.
6. Use the Quicklinks section or the fourth drop-down to select a period of time for the report.
7. A fifth drop-down appears in the Report Selector Bar if you have configured multiple sets of reporting hours. If present use it to select the desired report hours for the report.