I finally got a chance to kick the tires on our 8.5 release, and it kicked me back! I really like so much in 8.5, it is difficult to determine where to start!

The biggest wow factor to hit me was our enhanced DNS reporting. For years our customers have been asking, “Can you tell me how much traffic went to YouTube or Netflix?” Well, I am thrilled to say that finally the answer is yes.

With our DNS reporting you can now track all the data to any well-known public domain. The screen shot below of our Active Connections Report says it all. You can see the domains in the DST (destination) and SRC (source) columns for all live traffic flowing through the network.

In addition to being able to see public domains for all active traffic, you can now also view Traffic History for any host names that you have set up to track. You can see history for a selected public domain in the screenshot below.

I also love our expanded login capabilities. Many of our customers have a support Help Desk team on site. These are the first responders for network problems in your organization. Just like their counterparts in the medical field (EMTs), they may not be trained in advanced surgical techniques. For example, you would not want them making policy changes on your bandwidth controller, but you definitely need your help desk personnel to do some initial triage, gather some data, and keep the patient alive, until the doctor arrives on scene.

Our NEW Read Only login will give them access to RTR and all its advanced reporting screens, without the possibility of any life-threatening policy changes to the network.

You can see that this person is logged in as Read Only by looking in the top right portion of the menu bar for the RTR icon, or looking for the “report” login next to the new Logout feature.

And finally, we continue to expand our Preferences capabilities, so that you can customize your experience with the NetEqualizer.

“Remember one hundred and twenty eight thousand bytes per second is a Megabit.” I was getting tired of uttering this phrase and being an apologist for our units displayed on our connection tracking (Active Connections) screen. In fairness to our engineering team, the connection tracking table started out as a simple troubleshooting tool for internal use, and has now morphed into one of the more important real-time reporting screens for our customers.

With 8.5 we bring you units in Megabits (or whatever unit your preference may be)! See the screenshot below. Once you select your preference, these units will be on your Active Connections Report.

With our 8.5 release entering the system test phase, we will soon be looking for Beta Testers (June/July timeframe). If you are interested in participating, please contact us.