Informatics Portal

The Netify Informatics Portal is a cloud-based web application that provides access to your data. It is a responsive application designed to be usable from a device of any size.

Create Account

Navigate to the Netify Informatics Portal registration page here.

Enter your account information, read our Terms of Service (ToS) and click Create Account.

The I'm using a public computer/device checkbox ensures that any information (including your organization encryption key) is deleted from the browser upon logout. If you are not on a computer you trust/own, you should always select this option.

Check the inbox of your email used to create the account. An activation code/link will be sent to this address.

If you do not receive your activation email within a minute or two, check your spam box as it may have been misclassified. If you still have not received your activation link click on the Live Chat Live Chat link and talk to one of our team members who will ensure your account get's activate ASAP.

Upon clicking on the activation link, you'll be asked to set your password for login. This password is for you only, and can be reset easily if you forget it (unlike the organizational passphrase for encryption/zero-knowledge - see below).

Setup and Configuration

Each member of an organization can have their own login account. When creating the "Organizational Umbrella" requiring a passphrase for the data encryption/zero-knowledge features of Netify, be sure to use a passphrase unique to the Netify portal that you don't mind sharing with your colleagues.

You'll be asked to create an organization the first time you login (unless a colleague has invited you to join an existing organization). After that, you'll be asked to provision your first agent.

Navigating the Portal

The portal is divided up into 4 main sections:

  • Organizational Overview
  • Site Analytics
  • Deployments
  • Account
Organizational Overview

The organization section provides a high level overview of your organization. It brings visibility and insights into the network activity within your organization acting as a starting point to dig deeper or highlight information important to the health, security and productivity of your environment.

Filters

The Netify filters provide an extremely powerful way of changing the way you are presented with information and sift through the noise to find what you're looking for. Not all pages support the filter - for those that do, you will see the filter bar, similar to the image below. Clicking on the filter link will open up a dialog that presents all of the various filters that can be toggled.

Filter Bar

Time

Specifying an interval of time can be done with the preselected options in the drop down (ex "Past 12 hours", "1 day" etc.), or using a custom start/end date, available when the interval selected is set to "Custom". It is important to understand some of the ways Netify handles the massive amounts of data in order to present it to you in a timely manner.

The data used when the filter is either set to:

  • less than 24 hours from the current time
  • span an interval that is less than 24 hours

originates from a source containing the highest resolution of metadata available. For all other time filter settings, you will be looking at aggregate data models that are generated automatically every hour that makes a trade off between the size of the dataset (impacting speed to retrieve and display tables, graphs etc.) and the resolution of the dataset.

Type

Netify classifies your data into 5 types:

  • All Traffic: No flows are filtered in the analysis and presentation
  • Local Traffic: Internal (LAN-LAN) traffic only - could also include VPN, MPLS etc.
  • Internet Bound: LAN traffic that is egressing your gateway bound for the Internet
  • Internet Bound + WAN: LAN traffic and traffic originating from your gateway that is destined the Internet
  • WAN: Traffic originating from your gateway/firewall that is destined the Internet
Not all types of traffic make senses for all environments. For example, if you are using Netify while mirroring traffic from your switch, you will not have any WAN traffic detected.

Application

An application is a broad term - it could be a website, a mobile app, a web-service...anything that a user or IoT device might interact with over the Internet. We publish a partial list of applications, removing some of the more offensive ones for display only in the portal if they are detected. For a complete list, you'll need to familiarize yourself with the Netify Informatics API.

Seeing unclassified Applications in your data? Contact us about if you would like to help create an application profile that is missing in our database.

Protocol

Protocols are a much smaller subset than applications - the full list can be found here.

Device Discovery

The device discovery is a powerful feature within Netify. Rather than using IP or MAC addresses to identify devices, Netify uses various sources and techniques to 'fingerprint' a device based solely on the network flow traffic it is generating. When a new device first comes onto the network, limited data makes device discovery a bit uncertain, however, over time (in many cases, in as little as a few minutes), the confidence score attributed to the 'discovery' of a device will increase to the point where it can relied on to accurately describe the device.

Netify device discovery filters on categorical data that includes:

  • Hardware (Apple, Sony, Google, Nest etc.)
  • Type (Mobile phone, Tablet/eBook, Server, VoIP equipment, gaming consoles etc.)
  • Operating System (Linux, iOS, Android, Windows etc.)

Agent

Netify Data Scope An Agent refers to the Netify agent. An organization may have more than one agent associated with monitoring their infrastructure - multiple locations, remote workers at home, cloud-based infrastructure - these all represent different sites that could have one or more agents capturing metadata.

Network Details

Getting into a bit more technical, filtering on networking details provides tools inherent to any Netflow type traffic metadata.

Device

Netify allows users to specify three pieces of relational information about a networked device discovered on the network.

  • Device - a name or nick given to a device that uniquely identifies it (ex. Room 382 HP Printer).
  • Owner - a device can be assigned to an owner. Owners can have multiple devices. An example of an owner would be an employee's name.
  • Group - an owner can be assigned to a group. Groups can have many owners, and owners can belong to any number of defined groups. Sales or engineering are two examples of a group.
Netify's device, owner and group feature does not currently integrate with an organization's directory at this time - sorry!

To learn how to add, delete, import and export devices, owners and groups, click here.

Geolocation

Filter traffic by specific regions. This filter obviously operates only on traffic destined for the Internet.

Identity

Devices

To perform a bulk import of devices, click on Action Import. A CSV is a text file, so it can be created and edited using any text editor. More frequently, however, it is created by exporting (File then selecting Export or "Save as") from a spreadsheet such as LibreOffice Calc, Google Sheets or MS Excel.

The import format is a unique device label followed by the MAC address, with four optional columns to assign ownership, device, OS and type, either enclosed in quotes or not. Using a header row is optional. For example:

        Device Name,MAC,Owner,Device,OS,Type
        Moto X,9c:d9:17:d1:59:00,John,Sales,Mobile
        iPhone 7,7c:6d:62:ab:31:00,Rebecca,Engineering
    

Owners

To perform a bulk import of owners, click on Action Import. A CSV is a text file, so it can be created and edited using any text editor. More frequently, however, it is created by exporting (File then selecting Export or "Save as") from a spreadsheet such as LibreOffice Calc, Google Sheets or MS Excel.

Import Format

The import format is the first and last name separated by a comma, either enclosed in quotes or not. Using a header row is optional. For example:

        First Name,Last Name
        Thomas,Magnum
        Theodore,Calvin
        Rick,Wright
        Jonathan,Quayle Higgins III
    

Groups

To perform a bulk import of groups, click on Action Import. A CSV is a text file, so it can be created and edited using any text editor. More frequently, however, it is created by exporting (File Export) from a spreadsheet such as LibreOffice Calc, Google Sheets or MS Excel.

The import format is the name and a description separated by a comma, either enclosed in quotes or not. The use of a header field is optional. For example:

        Name,Description
        Sales,Sales and Marketing Teams
        Engineering,Engineering Team
    

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