" It has helped identify our biggest bandwidth abusers and malicious applications running on the network. It also has an easy interface to see the network stats on our different locations. "
Nick Rieber,
Technology Specialist,
Glenbard High School District 87.
Validating QoS policies with Cisco CBQoS - Enterprise edition now supports Cisco CBQoS and provides report on the per-class pre policy, post policy drops and queues. This new feature complements the already existing support for Cisco's Network based application recognition (NBAR), helping in application mapping and providing better quality of service.
User based dashboard page for guests / Operators - Each user can have their own dashboard, only viewing devices that need to be monitored by them, which can be sorted based on utilization, speed etc.
Business hour alerts - makes sure that the users do not have to worry about the alerts that might be generated during non-business hours. With the new version of NetFlow Analyzer, business hours can be preset as per the enterprise's need and the alerts can be activated only during that period.
Exclude IP address(es) option in IP groups - During creations of IP groups, the exclude option makes it much easier to exclude only particular addresses from a network as the requirement may be.
Radius authentication - Radius Server is useful in centralised management of user credential details. Once the user roles are defined in the User Management feature of NetFlow Analyzer, subsequent authentication of the user profiles can be done from the Radius Server.
Exclude encrypted applications - Enabling NetFlow on cryptomap tunnel interfaces double counts the ESP / GRE traffic. That can be prevented by applying this filter on cryptomap tunnel interfaces.
Output interface suppression - WAN optimizers compress the packets and therefore the flow size varies. The size of the packet going in and coming out is not the same, and the readings can be misleading and confusing, to say the least. To avoid this, "Output Interface Suppression" can be used. The interface in which the compression takes place (destination/output interface) can be suppressed.
ACL related drops -
Access control filter drops the flow information which contains data pertaining to dropped traffic due to Access Control List.
Other Enhancements:
DNS enhancement
Viewing older schedule reports from UI
Customize the period of time for which the data needs to shown in the traffic page.
Adding any PROTOCOL_APP (ex. TCP_APP, UDP_APP... ) applications from the specific conversations itself
Conversation Distribution Graph - Ability to see the graphs near the conversations.
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 presents you with all the vital metrics you need to be aware of as an administrator. You could drill down on it for any further information on any specific element of your network.
