Our last post was about NetFlow Analyzer’s IP SLA module. This post is about Branch Office Monitoring using NetFlow Analyzer, through the IP group and WAN RTT feature. The primary concern for a Network Administrator, managing WAN networks, is to ensure prompt delivery of business-critical applications. Generally, an application that is hosted in different branches, fails to perform due to two main reasons, which are:
1. Improper Bandwidth Allocation which means that, the available bandwidth is utilized by some non-critical applications.
2. Insufficient hardware allocation on the host machine.
Taking bandwidth allocation into consideration, a scenario-based explanation would facilitate easy understanding of the Application performance Analysis using NetFlow Analyzer.
Scenario:
Consider that a Company has three sites Site A , Site B and Site C as mentioned in the below Architecture diagram. 
Site B is where the data center is located and the business- critical applications are hosted on servers in the data center. Users in Site A and Site C access the applications hosted in the data center servers very often.
The company has a Share Point Application running on one of its servers hosted in Site B data center. There were updates due to Internet site content and the documents on a second-by-second basis from other sites(A and C). The Network Administrator managing these three sites, received a lot of complaints regarding delay in accessing the Share Point Application, especially from users in other sites. The Network Administrator came up with a solution and implemented a QoS policy using Netflow Analyzer, on the routers in sites A and C, to prioritize the traffic heading to the share point server from these sites:
Custom Application Mapping :-
Router(config)#ip nbar custom sharepoint tcp 1433
Traffic Class Creation :-
Router(config)# class-map database
Router(config-cmap)# match protocol DB
Policy Creation :-
Router(config)# policy-map Sharepointtraffic
Router(config-pmap)# class shareP
Router(config-pmap-c)# bandwidth percent 90
The above configuration allocates 90% of the bandwidth to the share point application.
The QoS implementation was successful and the network administrator got a positive feed back from the users about the performance of the application. The network administrator could see the amount of traffic heading to the share point application and also ensure that enough bandwidth is allocated for the business-critical application.
An IP group was then created (from Admin -> IP Groups) in NetFlow Analyzer, associating the IP Address of the server running the share point. It also associated the port and the protocol used by the application. The ports for the application ensures that traffic from a particular application alone, is captured by the IP Group. Router A was then associated with the WAN interface to the IP group. After a couple of days, he could generate traffic reports for business hours on the IP Group to ensure that the allocated bandwidth is effectively utilized by the share point.
The Administrator was satisfied about resolving the performance overhead issue.
The Network Administrator wanted to find out the response time or Round trip time for this share point application from each site (A and C). This would be dealt with, in-detail, in our next blog.
Thanks and Regards
Praveen Kumar
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