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. NetFlow Analyzer CBQoS reporting provides you in-depth visibility into the policies applied on your interfaces and the traffic patterns in your various class of traffic.
NetFlow Analyzer is capable of monitoring the QoS policies applied on the interfaces of the router and generate reports on Pre-Policy, Post-Policy, Drop and Queue metrics for each class. You can check the CBQoS reporting in NetFlow Analyzer from this link.
Though NetFlow and CBQoS reporting are used for traffic monitoring, they are based on diverse technologies. Some time back,ie. till version 7, NetFlow Analyzer had options to monitor only NetFlow supported interfaces for CBQoS statistics too. Customers who loved our CBQoS reporting feature were not able to monitor the devices that did not have NetFlow capabilities for CBQoS stats. Not fair ? Correct. That is why we brought the capabilities to add non NetFlow interfaces to the product for CBQoS monitoring.
NetFlow Analyzer detects the interfaces of a routing device based on the NetFlow packets exported from it and adds it to the database to show the traffic reports. If there are QoS policies available on the interface, polling for CBQoS data can be enabled and CBQoS reports will be available in the product.
But there are cases we mentioned about before. Customers do have devices which are either non NetFlow capable or NetFlow reports are not needed for. These devices may be an edge router used for branch connectivity which has no NetFlow capability but has quite a number of QoS policies for bandwidth shaping or a data center device where you are not interested in NetFlow reports but need to monitor QoS policies. Lets go on to see how such devices can be monitored for CBQoS stats.
Add Device.
If you have just installed NetFlow Analyzer and started the product for the first time with no device exporting NetFlow packets, you will see a message which states "No device exporting NetFlow packets to UDP port 9996, Click here to add device which has QoS policy" as soon as you login. In this case, you can click on the 'Add Device' option to add the devices you need to monitor for QoS. Here, provide the SNMP credentials for the device and NetFlow Analyzer will poll the device for CBQoS stats and generate reports.
If you are already using the product and wish to add a new device for CBQoS monitoring alone, navigate to NBAR/CBQoS configuration page, select the 'QoS Configuration' tab and from here click on the "Add device" link. You will be given options to enter the router IP Address and SNMP parameters for the device. Once this is done and you click on 'Scan', NetFlow Analyzer will detect the device and show the interfaces having CBQoS policies on them. You can then enable polling for the specific interfaces you need report for from the 'Polling for CBQoS data' category.
And again, what happens when you have CBQoS policies on a main physical interface which has no IP Address and it is the sub interface with IP Address that you are monitoring for NetFlow data? Most of the NetFlow tools detect only L3 NetFlow exporting interfaces, the sub interfaces in this case. But the traffic through the sub interfaces is shaped by the policies applied on the main physical interface and so it is necessary that the main interface is monitored for QoS analysis. NetFlow Analyzer will automatically detect such main interfaces though they are not L3 NetFlow exporting interfaces and show them in the list of interfaces available with QoS policies. You can add these main interfaces to CBQoS monitoring to get an idea on the CBQoS performance.
With NetFlow Analyzer not limiting you to monitor only NetFlow interfaces for CBQoS stats, why wait? Go ahead and add your routers to NetFlow Analyzer to see CBQoS reports. Try our 30 day trial with no feature limitations to know more.
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Regards
Praveen Kumar
This blog may need prior reading of my first blog about Flexible NetFlow. We have already discussed about the advantages of Flexible NetFlow and migration from traditional NetFlow versions to FNF. To make this transition smooth Cisco provides the option of pre-defined flow records which can be used to configure Flexible NetFlow without investing a lot of time. And as I mentioned earlier it also helps your existing NetFlow V9 collector to parse exported data. However to use Flexible NetFlow to its fullest potential or to monitor a specific network behavior, you should create your own customized records.
Let’s see how to configure Flexible NetFlow to export flow statistics. Flexible NetFlow export can be configured in three easy steps.
1. Configure the exporter
2. Configure the Flow Monitor with the pre-defined Flow Record and Flow Exporter attached to the monitor.
3. Add the Flow Monitor to the interface to monitor either ingress (input) or egress (output traffic).
1. Configuring Exporter
Flow exporter can be configured with a unique name. Multiple Flow exporter profiles can be configured. Below is the configuration to configure Flow Exporter.
flow exporter <exporter name>
destination <ip address of ME NFA>
transport udp <port number>
Example configuration:
flow exporter me_nfa_analyzer
destination 192.168.1.1
transport udp 9996
2. Flow Monitor and Flow record configuration
Flow record configuration defines the fields exported via NetFlow protocol. Flexible pre-defined flow records are based on the original NetFlow ingress or egress caches. Cisco provides a unique keyword to identify the pre-defined records and these records can associated with a Flexible NetFlow Flow record configuration. The Flexible NetFlow "netflow-original" and netflow ipv4 original-input are predefined records and these two records can be used interchangeably to export the basic key fields and time stamp fields. Flow monitors can also include packet sampling information if sampling is required.
flow monitor <monitor name>
record netflow-original
exporter <exporter name>
cache timeout active <seconds>
cache timeout inactive <seconds>
Example Configuration:
flow monitor me_nfa_monitor
record netflow-original
exporter me_nfa_analyzer
cache timeout active 60
3. Adding Flow Monitor to the interface
Flow Monitor has to be attached to a specific physical or logical interface to export flow statistics for that particular interface. Below is the configuration to attach flow monitor to a specific interface.
interface <interface name>
ip flow monitor <monitor_name> input
Example Configuration:
interface serial0/0
ip flow monitor me_nfa_monitor input
And the above configuration can be verified by "show flow monitor" command. As I mentioned earlier Flexible NetFlow has numerous advantages and has the power of supporting new performance monitoring statistics as soon as they are available. Flexible NetFlow is an evolving technology available in Cisco devices to help with visibility into how network assets are being used and the network behavior.
Please find more information on FNF here.
ManageEngine constantly studies the market and user demands to support new technologies. In fact ManageEngine NetFlow Analyzer is the first tool to support multiple bandwidth and performance monitoring technologies like NetFlow, NBAR and CBQoS in the market. And currently ManageEngine NetFlow Analyzer supports Flexible NetFlow without any issues. Please write your questions to netflowanalyzer-support@manageengine.com. We are happy to assist you at any moment.
Thanks
Raj
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Released!
NetFlow Analyzer Enterprise Edition 7.0 is packed with a load of amazing features. The official PR is available here.
And happy to announce that NetFlow Analyzer Enterprise Edition supports Cisco NetFlow (and other flows), Cisco NBAR and Cisco CBQoS out–of–the–box. Download the 30-day free trial and try it out in your network setup.
Following are some of the new features added in 7.0.
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