From blind spots to insights: Monitoring AI services with NetFlow Analyzer DPI
Imagine managing a city where thousands of new roads appear overnight, but none of them exist on your map. That's the challenge many IT teams face today with AI applications. Employees are increasingly using AI-powered services such as chatbots, code assistants, image generators, and productivity tools, often without formal approval or visibility from network administrators. These tools may boost productivity; however, they also introduce concerns around data security, compliance, bandwidth consumption, and application performance.
Traditional network monitoring tools can identify traffic patterns, but distinguishing AI-specific traffic from general web traffic remained difficult. Organizations need visibility beyond traditional application monitoring as AI applications become increasingly common in enterprise environments.
Cisco's 2026 WAN report found AI inference traffic growing four times in just eight months across real production networks. Yet, most enterprises still can't distinguish this traffic from general web activity.
Without visibility, organizations cannot determine:
- Which AI services are being accessed
- Which users are utilizing them
- How much traffic they generate
- Whether sensitive data is being shared externally
The first step to solving any problem is knowing it exists—and that starts with seeing what's actually on your network. Recognizing this challenge, NetFlow Analyzer has enhanced its DPI capabilities with AI Traffic Visibility and AI Service Mapping, enabling organizations to discover and monitor AI-related network activity with greater clarity and control.
Discover and map AI services with DPI
NetFlow Analyzer's DPI engine can now identify AI-related traffic traversing your network and classify it separately from traditional application traffic. The newly introduced AI Service Mapping page enables administrators to define and manage AI services by mapping domains associated with AI platforms through TCP protocol. Once configured, DPI automatically recognizes traffic associated with these services and categorizes it accordingly.
This provides a foundation for understanding how AI applications are being accessed within the organization and ensures that AI traffic is no longer hidden among general web activity.
Gain dedicated visibility into AI traffic
Once AI services are identified, NetFlow Analyzer presents dedicated AI-focused insights through a new AI Services dashboard.
Organizations can instantly view:
- Total AI traffic across the network
- Percentage of overall traffic generated by AI services
- Number of unique AI services in use
- Number of unique AI users
- Top AI services generating traffic
These metrics provide an immediate snapshot of AI adoption and usage trends within the organization. As AI adoption grows, these metrics help IT administrators determine whether AI tools are essential to business operations and how they impact network traffic.
The traffic volumes tell you the scale of AI adoption. But scale alone doesn't tell you whether those tools are actually working well for your users.
Analyze AI service metrics
Visibility alone is not enough. Organizations also need to understand how AI services perform from a user perspective.
NetFlow Analyzer introduces dedicated AI performance metrics, including:
- Average Network Response Time (NRT)
- Average Application Response Time (ART)
- Traffic utilization by AI service
These metrics help identify performance bottlenecks and determine whether the bottleneck is caused by the network or the AI application itself. By monitoring response times, IT teams can proactively troubleshoot user experience issues and ensure that business-critical AI applications remain accessible and responsive.
Monitoring data tells you how AI services behave on the network. The next question is: who's driving that behavior?
Identify AI users and usage patterns
Understanding who is using AI services is just as important as knowing which services are being accessed. The new AI visibility capabilities allow administrators to correlate AI traffic with users and applications, making it easier to identify patterns across departments and teams.
This information can support:
- AI governance initiatives
- Network capacity planning
- Usage trend analysis
- Security and compliance reviews
- AI adoption assessments
Whether an organization is planning to adopt AI or establishing policies around AI usage, having accurate usage data is essential for informed decision-making. Together, visibility, bandwidth, and usage data give IT teams something they've never had before: complete, actionable intelligence on AI activity across the entire organization.
Bringing AI visibility to network traffic monitoring
AI applications are becoming a permanent part of enterprise networks. As adoption grows, organizations need the same level of visibility into AI services that they already have for standard applications. With the introduction of AI Traffic Visibility Reports and AI Service Mapping, NetFlow Analyzer extends its DPI capabilities to help organizations identify AI services, monitor AI traffic, analyze performance, and understand AI usage across the network.
The organizations that thrive in an AI-driven world won't just be the ones using AI—they'll be the ones who can see it, measure it, and manage it. NetFlow Analyzer gives you that visibility to see AI activity clearly without losing sight of what matters most: complete network visibility.
AI Is everywhere in your network. Now you can see it. To learn more about how AI Services works, explore our free ManageEngine NetFlow Analyzer Demo.