Network visibility is the key to better network performance. I came across an article that emphasized on the usage of NetFlow technology to gain better visibility of the network. The same that we at ManageEngine have been focusing on for years together. The author, Susan J. Campbell says, “Without NetFlow, network engineers only see traffic information for a fraction of the links in the network”. she also adds that “By understanding NetFlow on an end-to-end basis, you can gain much better insight into service delivery as opposed to simply collecting generic interface bandwidth statistics through the SNMP”.
Many enterprises today have adopted NetFlow technology to monitor their network but the question is how far they are aware of the advantages of this technology and the way they could use it to improve their network’s performance. There are only a handful.
NetFlow is a Cisco developed flow technology that allows bandwidth monitoring of a network. It is basically a caching technique. Cisco tried reorganizing its device caches based on the flow information to speed up network flows and Layer 3 switching, in the presence of access lists. This resulted in a more efficient code that collected flow statistics from devices and gave much better visibility into the network. With this collected data, tracking the nature traffic, that entered or exited an ISP or corporate network became much more efficient.
NetFlow examines each packet that is sent from a router or switch for a set of IP packet attributes like source IP address, destination IP address, source port number, destination port number, protocol type, type of services, and the router input interface. NetFlow creates a NetFlow cache entry that holds information about the active flows. For each active flow, a flow record is maintained within the NetFlow cache. These flow records contain keyfields that can be later used for exporting data to a collection device. NetFlow creates the flow records by identifying packets with similar flow characteristics and counting or tracking the packets and bytes per flow and exports the flow records to a flow collector periodically.
NetFlow provides a highly informative and detailed view of all network traffic that entered the router or switch. It helps to analyze end to end traffic flows for faster network troubleshooting, security and planning along with the information about the devices in the network. However, the reporting is purely based on the type of tool employed.
The ManageEngine NetFlow Analyzer reports on data flows to help you in further research on the WAN/LAN problem. It collects NetFlow packets exported from enterprise routers and switches and generates network traffic reports. With the NetFlow data, the NetFlow Analyzer reports on the amount of traffic passing through each interface, and the type of application traversing through that interface. Using this network administrators can identify on wasted bandwidth and define QoS policies. By identifying applications that are major bandwidth consumers network administrators can focus on efficiency.
ManageEngine NetFlow Analyzer interprets the NetFlow data and provides network visibility on an end-to-end basis. NetFlow Analyzer also gives the ability to drill down to individual applications that are consuming bandwidth and thereby identity of the users abusing network bandwidth. In case of network downtime, the network administrator can easily identify the applications consuming bandwidth. This gives in-depth visibility into the network incidents and helps in faster troubleshooting. By identifying applications that are major bandwidth consumers network administrators can focus on efficiency.
ManageEngine NetFlow Analyzer is aligned to Cisco technologies such as NetFlow, NBAR and CBQoS that takes network traffic monitoring to a new level. It also supports data flows such as sFlow, JFlow, cFlowd without any additional hardware probe. NetFlow Analyzer provides a host of features that make managing NetFlow devices and monitoring NetFlow data a lot less complicated.
Happy Monitoring!
Vithya
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