Many organizations use an extensive range of Cisco devices for managing their network, from switches to servers. To ensure there are no hiccups in the performance of business critical applications and productivity, network administrators should proactively monitor the uptime of these devices.
However, monitoring an entire Cisco environment is not easy, due to an array of responsibilities like configuration management, availability monitoring and bandwidth bottlenecks that need troubleshooting. Overcoming these challenges requires an advanced Cisco bandwidth monitoring tool that provides visibility and reporting into the entire infrastructure.
On this page, we'll discuss:
Most organizations today are challenged with understanding the growing complexity of their networks, and managing the network to avoid the need to troubleshoot. Without a comprehensive bandwidth monitoring tool, finding which endpoint is at fault can be challenging. Other challenges include:
NetFlow Analyzer is a holistic Cisco bandwidth monitoring software which helps you check the bandwidth usage and traffic for all Cisco devices in your network infrastructure, including servers, switches, and routers. With this Cisco bandwidth monitor, you can monitor the bandwidth usage by each application or protocol, and conversations, as well as optimize network performance, and plan the future bandwidth requirements.
Some of the key features of NetFlow Analyzer that help you with effective Cisco bandwidth monitoring:
NetFlow Analyzer gives you insights into all the flow and non-flow exporting Cisco devices of your infrastructure, from servers to switches, routers to firewalls, and interfaces.
You can also monitor all the wireless Cisco devices in your infrastructure, like controllers, and access points. Gain extensive visibility into the traffic percentage of the associated SSIDs, Client IP, and MAC addresses along with their applications. You can also isolate the rogue devices, or restrict them from accessing your network.
With NetFlow Analyzer, you can gain visibility into which application is hogging your network bandwidth, and declining your business-critical applications' performance. Monitor the Layer 4, and custom or homegrown applications' traffic by mapping applications using the solution's capabilities.
With NetFlow Analyzer's Cisco NBAR2 technology, you can also monitor the Layer 7 applications using dynamic ports, and find their utilization to optimize your network's performance. Gain insights into resource-intensive applications, such as social media, video streaming, and gaming platforms.
Diagnose and eliminate any security threats in your Cisco environment by detecting known and unknown security attacks. With network behavior analysis, or network behavior anomaly detection, you can find the new and unusual activities in your network, and discover if they pose a potential security threat to your organization.
Monitor the performance of your organization's Cisco servers with NetFlow Analyzer's deep packet inspection (DPI). You can install the DPI for up to ten devices, and get real-time application and network response times for applications and conversations of the TCP, as well as find the traffic volume of the UDP. You can determine the root cause of a congestion issue, whether it is because of the application or on the network side.
Control how your network's bandwidth should be utilized with traffic-shaping options like QoS, access control list (ACL), and service policy. Improve the performance of your network by restricting or blocking specific resource-intensive applications that hog your bandwidth. You can prioritize the traffic based on your business requirements, and make sure all the mission-critical applications are receiving enough bandwidth. Check the relevance and effectiveness of the applied policies with class-based QoS (CBQoS) class maps.
Reduce the impact of your network issues before they disrupt productivity, by setting up alerts for the instances when bandwidth usage goes below or above the baseline performance. With real-time and aggregated alerts, you can set the threshold, severity, and action to get alerted when the data usage matches the threshold.
NetFlow Analyzer also has a preconfigured Link Down alert to notify you when any of the interfaces of the devices go down. You can choose any notification template, like Email, SMS, chat, and Log a Ticket, to get notified for the event.
Reduce the mean time to know (MTTK) score for troubleshooting your Cisco bandwidth monitoring by grouping the devices based on departments, or branch offices. NetFlow Analyzer helps you create logical devices, IP, interface, and access point groups to help you monitor and manage your bandwidth usage effectively. You can also assign specific user roles such as administrators, operators, and guests, for better accessibility and security purposes.
NetFlow Analyzer can make your Cisco environment's bandwidth monitoring streamlined with router and switch traffic monitoring.
Want to get started with NetFlow Analyzer? Contact our experts today!