Bandwidth is lately referred to as black gold. And that is mainly because it is becoming another sought after commodity. The thirst for bandwidth is ever-increasing & the reasons being everything ranging from the bubble burst of digital media & visual content on the web, more and more vampires of bandwidth in the form of torrents etc.
It is becoming increasingly difficult for the Network Administrators to ensure priority to applications that are critical to the running of the business over applications that use bandwidth for other purposes. It is not uncommon to see employees streaming music and exchanging text messages(and video chats) through applications that surpass normal monitoring software.
Applications like eMule, Fasttrack, eDonkey etc. are capable of using dynamic ports and escape normal methods of scrutiny. To ensure that this type of traffic information is captured, we need some means to dig packet information deeper. This leads us to CISCO NBAR which does deep packet analysis and classifies critical traffic from the non-critical based on the configuration.
A lot of companies have a stringent Internet policy but that sometimes makes the employees a little uncomfortable due to several reasons. Nevertheless, Internet usage is more of a privilege than a right and to draw that line, the management needs to take a safe stance which is uncompromising in ensuring priority to business critical traffic & also to not cause employee resentment. To perform a balancing act, the Network Administrator needs to be a little liberal as well as vigilant. Having an Internet policy to regulate the use of Internet in a productive manner helps a great deal in ensuring proper bandwidth management.
Using NetFlow Analyzer’s NBAR Reporting feature, it is possible to monitor the network usage at a much deeper level as compared to conventional monitoring means. For the ease of monitoring, domain name configuration is possible & it will clearly spell out information on the nature of traffic, the amount of bandwidth it ate up and that information is vital in ensuring the effectiveness of the Organization’s Internet policy.
NBAR also does traffic prioritizing & bandwidth allocation. This post would give valuable insights in that direction.
The level of visibility these reports give the Administrator is very deep. The loopholes that a normal packet analysis technology would leave are filled through deep packet inspection. Analysis at this level of depth captures traffic & applications that use dynamic ports which in most cases would be because of privilege violations(Downloading torrents, streaming music, text chats, video chat for non-business purposes) during business hours choking the network bandwidth & affecting the speed of critical applications.
Through NBAR reports one could ensure that the business network isn’t misused for purposes other than reasons pertaining to business. This results in making productive and optimum use of available bandwidth. The add-on that you get out of this is that the productivity of the employees in your organization would also improve when the Internet usage policy is channelized in a productive direction as this.
Download ManageEngine’s NetFlow Analyzer. Configure NBAR. Ensure maximum productivity in every sense.
Sai Sundhar Padmanabhan
Marketing Analyst
Netflow Analyzer Team
