NetFlow Analyzer saves Money and more – Capacity Planning reports

NetFlow Analyzer v8.6 has been released with variety of new features. To add more value to the existing reporting functionality one new feature added is Capacity Planning reports. This feature is included under the Professional Plus edition and will be available to all Plus edition customers and in the trial mode.

What is Capacity Planning :

Capacity Planning is a common term which indicates measures to be taken to accommodate the growth over period of time. This is exactly what the Capacity Planning reports in NetFlow Analyzer will do – Help determine the network traffic growth over a time period and in turn helps decide if you really need that high cost – high bandwidth link or not.

Need For Capacity Planning:-

Some of the needs for a capacity planning report if you have not thought about one before are:

1. Traffic trending over a time period.

2. Analyze Traffic Growth.

3. Determine if it is really the business critical applications that were in the top 10 of your bandwidth.

4. Decide if the existing bandwidth is sufficient or not.

With no policing enabled, all traffic has equal priority in the network and this an equal chance of being delivered or dropped !

Due to this, business critical applications need to be provisioned the highest priority in the network for obviously known reasons. This is where QoS policing comes into the picture. Network administrators implement QoS policies to ensure that their business-critical applications receive the highest priority on the network and unwanted applications are dropped.

After implementing QoS policies, network administrators have to get an understanding on the link performance to ensure that everything is as expected. The capacity planning report will show the link usage over time and the top applications used. You can now make sure that the capacity planning was done without including the applications that had to be dropped by QoS policing and thus ensure the higher bandwidth needed is indeed due to business critical applications.

Generating Capacity Planning Report:

The capacity planning Report is available for all interfaces which are being monitored under the NetFlow Analyzer Professional Plus Edition. You can drill down to a specific interface on the traffic tab and you will have the Capacity Planning option.

When you click on Capacity Planning Report, the report will be generated. There are also options to select required time periods, filter by business hours and exclude weekends. This report gives the one-minute average of IN & OUT traffic in terms of volume, speed, utilization and packets. This report also gives the daily average use for the selected time period, max, min and average values for the data points along with top 10 IN and OUT applications. The Standard Deviation column on the traffic report adds advantage in understanding the variation or ‘dispersion’ for a period of time.

The Capacity planning report will generate graphs as below:

Reporting granularity:

Up to 1 Year —> 1 Minute Average

Usage Report:

Up to 30 Days           —>  Daily Report

Greater than 30 Days —> Monthly Reports

With capacity planning in your fold through NetFlow Analyzer, you can show that the higher bandwidth link you discusse
d about is what you indeed need.

Try the 30 day trial to see this and more features.

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Regards,
Praveen Kumar