We are very happy to announce that our 8.5 Release is now Generally Available.

Tip #1: Using Wildcarding with Host Names
For those of you that are experimenting with the new 8.5 Release, we encourage you to try our reporting by DNS Host Name feature. One tip that will come in handy when using this feature is our wild card (*) prefix feature. For example, on a system here in our home office we use multiple security cameras, which all register their cloud DNS name as “tag”.amazonaws.com. The “tag” prefix is different for each camera, hence if we want to see the total upload traffic we set up our host name as “*.amazonaws.com.” which causes the NetEqualizer reporting chart to show us the aggregate traffic of all cameras.

In this first picture, you can see that we have set up *.amazonaws.com. as a Tracked Host, by adding it to RTR -> Traffic History -> Manage Tracked Hosts.

In our second picture, you can see the Download traffic has been aggregated for *amazonaws.com for the last week. This is a great tool to help us see the total usage on our network for our security cameras. When the download traffic is 0, our cameras were down.

Tip #2: Making Pools Even Better
Pools are a very powerful tool within the NetEqualizer that essentially allow you to take a segment of your network and apply a virtual NetEqualizer to a group of users. Up until the 8.5 Release, the virtual NetEqualizer within a Pool was forced to use the global parameter of HOGMIN or RATIO to trigger when Equalizing would kick in. For large networks with small pools this often created a dilemma. Do you tune your HOGMIN and RATIO for the entire Network or for the smaller pool segment? The good news is in 8.5 you no longer have to choose. When you define or edit your Pool configuration you can set a local RATIO and HOGMIN specific for each pool you define.

This is a great way to offer difference levels of service to groups of users. For example, you may want Equalizing to kick in sooner for one Pool, but allow larger traffic to go through without being equalized. You would do this by setting a lower RATIO and are larger HOGMIN than your global parameters. This is shown in our example below, where Pool 102 “Tier 2” has a RATIO = 80% and HOGMIN of 3Mbps. This is compared to the global RATIO of 85% and HOGMIN of 2Mbps. Pool 103 “Tier 3” is using the global default parameters, which is shown using brackets [ ].

If you are interested in exploring the 8.5 Release, and how you might use pool-specific RATIO and HOGMIN or DNS Host Names, please contact us. The 8.5 Release is free to customers with valid NSS (NetEqualizer Software and Support) subscriptions.