Network traffic analysis & troubleshooting

Gain in–depth information on network traffic composition
Know what your network traffic is comprised of through reports on top applications, hosts, protocols, DSCP etc. for every link and for any configurable IP based group. You can analyze your network traffic over multi–vendor routers and switches through the NetFlow Plug–in. Supported network protocols include NetFlow^® version 5, 7 and 9, sFlow^®, cflowd^®, jFlow^®, IPFIX^®, NetStream^® and Cisco^® NBAR technology.

Use advanced application recognition
The NetFlow Plug–in’s ability to map applications by combining IP Address, Port and Protocol enables you to know in detail about your applications using the network bandwidth. Further, you can also identify applications (e.g. Skype) that use dynamic ports using Cisco’s Network Based Application Recognition (NBAR) and ensure that these do not consume huge bandwidth.

Troubleshoot bandwidth problems
The NetFlow plug–in supports custom application mapping which helps you extract accurate network traffic utilization reports. You can know exactly what applications have been using bandwidth and for how long, you can also further drill–down to see the top hosts using those applications. In case of worms, virus or Denial–of–Service (DoS) attacks, the NetFlow plug–in facilitates quick problem isolation and resolution to bring down your Mean Time To Resolve.

Validate network QoS policies
The Cisco CBQoS add–on helps you qualify the QoS policies set on the router and ensure that the right type of traffic gets priority in the network. By studying the traffic composition at pre–policy and post–policy together with the resultant dropped traffic, you can easily judge effectiveness of the implemented QoS policy.

Make important capacity planning decisions
The NetFlow plug-in allows you to create powerful custom reports to analyze bandwidth usage trends in detail e.g. bandwidth used by a specific host/ network accessing an application during a particular week. By creating IP address based departments / divisions and filtering based on applications and interfaces, you also get critical inputs for enterprise bandwidth capacity planning.

Have your own bandwidth billing system
You can now rest your suspicions of being overcharged by cross–checking ISP charges with your own billing system available with the Billing add–on. You can also associate bandwidth costs to each department in your organization to help you plan well with allocated bandwidth budgets. The Billing add–on over the NetFlow plug–in helps you to account your bandwidth by assigning costs to usage (volume–based) or bandwidth (speed–based).