CBQoS (Class Based Quality of Service) is a Cisco feature set that is part of the IOS 12.4(4)T and above. This provides information about the QoS policies applied and class based traffic patterns within an enterprise's network.
Why do you need it?
A network manager’s top priority is to ensure that the business critical applications get the optimum priority. Typically, networks operate on the basis of best-effort delivery, in which all traffic has equal priority and an equal chance of being delivered. When congestion results, all traffic has an equal chance of being dropped. Or, in case a particular traffic is to be prioritized, appropriate QoS policies can be applied as per the requirement.
Network administrators implement QoS policies to ensure that their business-critical applications receive the highest priority on the network. CBQoS can make network performance more predictable and bandwidth utilization more effective. CBQoS provides you in-depth visibility into the policies applied on your links and the traffic patterns in your various class of traffic.
How can NetFlow Analyzer help you?
ManageEngine NetFlow Analyzer supports Cisco CBQoS and thus reports on the QoS policies that you have deployed. The report shows the pre-policy, post-policy and drops in different traffic class along with the queuing. This enables you to validate the QoS policies. You can change your policies according to the reports, which you see in NetFlow Analyzer. This is a tool, which can be best used for QoS policy validation.
As a network manager you need to be on top of your network to be in control of the day-to-day happenings in your network. Especially, with more and more businesses being increasingly dependent on the internet, it is very vital that you are in total control of your network.Any network outage has to be quickly attended to and fixed right away. More importantly any network incidents has to be pro-actively attended to. NetFlow Analyzer with its proactive alerting mechanisms ensure that you are informed of any network exceptions as it happens. Also the drill down features let you quickly pin down the cause of any network problems and troubleshoot faster.
It is also very essential that you ensure your business critical applications are not starved off bandwidth while non-critical activities like music downloads hog the available bandwidth. By giving you an indepth visibility in to your network and the bandwidth usage statistics you can appropriately set QoS policies. It is also possible to categorize applications that consume bandwidth by port, protocol and IP address. This way you can be fully empowered to ensure that the business critical applications always have the required bandwidth.
As a network administrator you need to have all the reports to take the right decision. Especially when it comes to bandwidth capacity planning decisions the stakes involved are high and even a small mistake can cost huge money. NetFlow Analyzer with its long range historical reporting lets you take the right decisions. Also as a network administrator you need to have periodic reporting to understand how the network is performing. NetFlow Analyzer's automatic report generation feature at scheduled time periods help you with just that.
Should you need any specific information at any point in time, you could just access the application for a quick snapshot. NetFlow Analyzer's dashboard presnet you with all the vital metrics you need to eb aware on as an administrator. You could drill down on it for any further infromation on any specific element of your network.