Paglo Adds 'NetFlow' to IT Search Service

Published: March 3, 2009

by Alex Woodie

When Paglo unveiled its new search service for IT departments last year, it put an entirely new spin on drearisome tasks, such as counting the number of PCs on a LAN or checking routers for software updates. With the launch of Paglo's new NetFlow application last week, the IT search service company has delivered another compelling feature: graphical depictions of bandwidth use.

Paglo is an IT search site that was released last May. The offering consists of three components, including a crawler, a search index, and a Web 2.0-style user interface. Once downloaded, the crawler automatically discovers all servers, devices, and software living on the customer's network, and feeds that information back to index servers, which are managed by Paglo.

Customers can perform keyword searches against this index from the comfort of their Web browsers, and view results that pertain only to their IT infrastructure. For example, a customer could perform a search to see which Apache Web servers have unpatched vulnerabilities. In addition to search, customers can utilize other Paglo goodies, such as an inventory management application, pre-built dashboards, alerts, pre-defined searches, and other "ShareIT" applications created by the Paglo community and shared in open source fashion.

The latest application added to the Paglo offering supports the NetFlow technology pioneered by Cisco in its routers. By gaining support for Cisco's NetFlow protocol, it gives Paglo the capability to provide much more detail about network traffic than it was previously able to do.

With support for NetFlow, Paglo can not only show customers the aggregate traffic flowing through their LAN link, but it can show the user who is consuming the traffic, who's speaking to whom, and what protocols and services are being used, says Bryan de Haaff, CEO of the Palo Alto, California, company.

Paglo's support for Cisco's NetFlow protocol gives a graphical view of user and application network connections, as well as bandwidth consumed.

"This is the reason we just delivered the new application called NetFlow," de Haaff says. "What I can do is look at the width of the link, which tells me how much traffic is being consumed in that connection. I can also click on it to drill down, and get a read out of traffic utilization by individual users."

NetFlow has several users. It could be used by IT administrators to patrol their users' Internet habits and discourage users from visiting inappropriate Web sites while at work. "But most of the time," de Haaff says, managers are "just trying to get a handle of what's happening on the network so they can implement policies and procedures to help influence how people actually consume bandwidth."

Since Paglo unveiled its service last year, it's attracted 5,000 customers, who use the service to monitor more than 500,000 devices and over 2.5 million pieces of software, according to de Haaff. Paglo offers crawlers for Windows and Linux, which deliver deep information on the uses of those operating systems. Other operating systems, such as IBM's i OS, can be monitored only tangentially, or through APIs or SNMP, which can be incorporated into Paglo.

Paglo will monitor your first 20 devices for 30 days for free. After that, users must purchase a license. For more information, visit www.paglo.com.

RELATED STORY

Paglo Aims to be the Google of IT Management

                     Post this story to del.icio.us
               Post this story to Digg
    Post this story to Slashdot