Caligare Flow Inspector monitors and analyzes NetFlow exports from existing routers, without requiring deployed probes. Its web-based management interface lets administrators configure collectors, network devices, application groups, and anomaly detection. The product provides real-time network analysis, user data tracking, and statistics for leading hosts, protocols, applications, and conversations. Caligare says this visibility can help reveal suspicious activity, denial-of-service attacks, worm-infected stations, bottlenecks, and routing problems. The free edition handles NetFlow versions 1, 5, 6, 7, and 9, along with low-level traffic searches, interface utilization and maps, filtering, forwarding, and local, LDAP, or external authentication. Its free license is for non-commercial use and is limited to two devices, 24-hour history, and 250 flows per second. Professional and Enterprise editions add longer historical trends, network anomaly detection, unrestricted parsing, and commercial use. A 30-day trial license can be requested by email. Linux packages are listed, and the latest version requires MySQL 5.1 or newer.
Who it is for
The editions address enterprise users monitoring unlimited devices, businesses monitoring one to nine, and non-commercial users monitoring up to two. The free edition is specifically limited to non-commercial use.
What is good
- Analyzes exports from existing routers without probes.
- Provides real-time network analysis.
- Free edition supports five listed NetFlow versions.
- Includes LDAP and external authentication options.
- A 30-day trial license can be requested.
What to know first
- Free edition is non-commercial only.
- Free edition allows up to two devices.
- Free edition keeps 24-hour history.
- Latest version requires MySQL 5.1 or newer.
Verdict
Flow Inspector provides network visibility from NetFlow exports, with the free edition covering basic monitoring and a narrow device and history allowance. Commercial use and extended analysis features are listed for the Professional and Enterprise editions.
Caligare Flow Inspector plans and pricing
All plansCompared on network traffic analysis software
- Free plan
- Yes
- Flow protocols
- NetFlow 1, 5, 6, 7, 9
- Application visibility
- Yes
- Conversation analysis
- Yes
- Bandwidth monitoring
- Yes
- Deployment
- on_premises
