The complexity in monitoring today's IT comes with a range of challenges for network admins. Take cloud technology, for instance. From flexibility, less demands on resources, streamlined connectivity, and being more cost-effective, there are several benefits. On the other hand, the huge volume of traffic, risks of malware penetration, visibility, compliance issues, etc. make cloud technology challenging for an enterprise.
A regular IT landscape is a mix of the new technologies; with that comes a huge amount of traffic and potential issues. Monitoring these technologies requires robust control and advanced technology in place to curb potential performance and security issues. The technology should provide in-depth visibility into the traffic and help reinforce policy regulations and control access to unauthorized applications.
Deep packet inspection (DPI) rapidly monitors, manages, and optimizes network traffic to save network incidents before they produce adverse impacts. This technology follows the approach of recognizing data packets when they pass through the network and provides traffic graph details at a granular level. These details include the packets' content, despite them being encrypted or compressed.
While there are many deep packet inspection tools available in the market, the tool you use should offer the flexibility to monitor your environment with ease. Unlike other tools that primarily focus on just one of the traffic monitoring technologies, ManageEngine NetFlow Analyzer allows both flow and packet capture analysis advantages without any external tools or add-ons. With Network Packet Sensor, an agent that offers DPI to view the network traffic, find where performance loopholes lie, and help optimize your network's policies.
The DPI Engine tracks packets from different endpoints and gathers information, including headers and payload information. This is followed by sorting out packets based on protocols. Once the structure and format are understood, NetFlow Analyzer's deep packet inspection engine allows administrators to sort the traffic usage by applications or protocols associated.
Deep packet inspection monitoring in NetFlow Analyzer helps you monitor and analyze the traffic of every endpoint in your wired and wireless networks such as servers, firewalls, routers, switches, and access points. Hybrid environments are prone to traffic flowing between on-premise and cloud environments, and deep packet inspection helps in identifying performance loopholes and in creating strategies to optimize traffic routing for better performance.
NetFlow Analyzer's deep packet inspection allows for detailed monitoring with identifying applications, their protocols, and usage patterns. With deriving performance metrics such as response times, latency, total traffic volume, and much more, you can find which applications require more bandwidth. Also, analyze traffic patterns of essential applications like CRM, ERP, and monitor their bandwidth usage patterns to help you find any peak usage hours and suspicious sources, if any.
As the saying "Insights without actions is meaningless" goes, your investments and performance can get out of hand without right action plans in place. NetFlow Analyzer lets you shape traffic by configuring latency, delay, and packet loss ratios so that critical applications like VoIP calls or video conferences have low latency. By adding classes and policies, you can prevent downtime issues from non-business critical applications' high bandwidth usage and ensure smooth communication.
With deep packet inspection, every packet is inspected and their respective information, such as source, destination, protocols, and applications, is reported as forensic data. You can configure these reports for different protocols such as TCP/UDP, mention criteria such as source/destination networks, nodes, or applications and URL, etc. and generate the report for only that particular source.
I have been using NetFlow Analyzer for more than 10 years now, in my previous company and continue using it now. I think it's a must to control, monitor, and investigate what is happening with network traffic.
-IT Manager in the Manufacturing industry
Review as provided by our NetFlow Analyzer's customers to Gartner® Peer Insights™.