ADNet Traffic Flow Reports

 

ADNet Flow Reports Features
Customers will have the ability to perform ad-hoc reporting and will be able to customize the way ADCom tracks their data. Some of the features available and reporting options include:

  • Customize which ports to track and report on, can name the ports as they wish and can choose the color assigned to each tracked port.
  • Assign "name-tags" to a customized view of data.
  • Automatic classification of "other" traffic.
  • Reverse DNS Lookups provide URLs of public IP addresses.
  • Reports of utilization by Class of Service.
  • Reports by AS Number can reveal site-tosite traffic details even on MPLS networks.
  • Rogue applications can be found and the source of those applications can be identified.
  • New applications can be tracked to see how much bandwidth they really are using.
  • Alerts on excessive application use or illegal TCP flag combinations
IT managers face the daily challenge of managing critical business applications across their network infrastructure. This activity is more than just monitoring for up/down status and troubleshooting circuit and router issues. Today's IT Manager needs to be able to troubleshoot performance problems, perform capacity analysis and  generate internal usage statistics for charge backs to the various business units. In order to effectively manage performance and utilization, the IT Manager needs the ability to accurately measure and analyze traffic across the enterprise network.

Many IT Managers utilize SNMP to routinely collect usage statistics from routers and track utilization on WAN and LAN ports. While SNMP provides excellent statistics on the macro level, it does not provide the level of detail that is often required to completely resolve many network issues. ADNet - Flow Reports will help with root cause analysis and application management.

The ADNet Flow Reporting System gives the IT Manager the ability to collect IP network traffic data utilizing a Cisco router as a probe and has the following advantages:

  • No capital investment
  • Simple configuration
  • Track all IP applications
  • Low lifecycle maintenance
  • Intuitive, detailed reporting
ADNet - Flow Reports allow you to quickly identify top talkers, utilization by application, rogue applications, utilization by AS number on MPLS networks, utilization by Class of Service and many more statistics critical in managing application performance.

How does it work?
ADCom will provide a secure web portal for access to graphs, charts, tabular data and file downloads of the flow data collected on the network.

Some simple configuration changes will be required in each router chosen to collect data from. These configuration changes will enable Netflow in the router and will have the router export the flow data to a ADCom server via an IPSec tunnel. The ADCom server will process the flow data it receives to assign the flows to the correct Protocol names and name-tags based on the customer's specifications.

Minimum Requirements
In order to qualify for this service, a network must utilize Cisco routers and have at a minimum, IOS version 12.0.3. An IPSec tunnel will need to be built between the customer's firewall and ADCom. All flow data will be sent to ADCom servers via this tunnel. ADCom will also need access to the SNMP community strings for every router forwarding flow data. SNMP will be used to obtain the name of the interfaces on the router so meaningful names can be displayed on the reports. The customer will need to make the appropriate configuration changes on each router as specified by ADCom or, if the customer chooses, ADCom can make these changes if provided with the necessary passwords.