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How Traffic Accounting Keeps You One Step Ahead Of The Competition

IT has steadily evolved from a service and operational delivery mechanism to a strategic business investment. Suffice it to say that the business world and technology have become so intertwined that it’s unsurprising many leading companies within their respective industries attribute their success largely to their adoptive stance toward innovation.

Network Managers know that much of their company’s ability to outmaneuver the competition depends to a large extent on IT Ops’ ability to deliver world-class services. This brings traffic accounting into the conversation, since a realistic and measured view of your current and future traffic flows is central to building an environment in which all the facets involved in its growth, stability and performance are continually addressed.

In this blog, we’ll take a look at how traffic accounting places your network operations center (NOC) team on the front-foot in their objective to optimize the flow of your business’ most precious cargo – its data.

All roads lead to performance baselining 

Performance baselines lay the foundation for network-wide traffic accounting against predetermined environment thresholds. They also aid IT Ops teams in planning for network growth and expansion undertakings. Baseline information typically contains statistics on network utilization, traffic components, conversation and address statistics, packet information and key device metrics.

It serves as your network’s barometer by informing you when anomalies such as excessive bandwidth consumption and other causes of bottlenecks occur. For example, root causes to performance issues can easily creep into an environment unnoticed: such as a recent update to a business critical application that may cause significant spikes in network utilization.  Armed with a comprehensive set of baseline statistics and data that allows Network Performance and Security Specialists to measure, compare and analyze network metrics,   root causes such as these can be identified with elevated efficiency.

In broader applications, baselining gives Network Engineers a high-level view of their environments, thereby allowing them to configure Quality of Service (QoS) parameters, plan for upgrades and expansions, detect and monitor trends and peering analysis and a bevy of other functions.

Traffic accounting brings your future network into focus

With new-generation technologies such as the cloud, resource virtualization, as a service platforms and mobility revolutionizing the networks of yesteryear, capacity planning has taken on a new level of significance. Network monitoring systems (NMS) need to meet the demands of the new, complex, hybrid systems that are the order of the day. Thankfully, technologies such as NetFlow have evolved steadily over the years to address the monitoring demands of modern networks. NetFlow accounting is a reliable way to peer through the wire and get a deeper insight to the traffic that traverses your environment. Many Network Engineers and Security Specialists will agree that their understanding of their environments hinges on the level of insight they glean from their monitoring solutions.

This makes NetFlow an ideal traffic accounting medium, since it easily collects and exports data from virtually any connected device for analysis by a CySight . The technology’s standing in the industry has made it the “go-to” solution for curating detailed, insightful and actionable metrics that move IT organizations from a reactive to proactive stance towards network optimization

Traffic accounting’s influence on business productivity and performance

As organizations become increasingly technology-centric in their business strategies, their reliance on networks that consistently perform at peak will increase accordingly. This places new pressures on Network Performance and Security Teams  to conduct iterative performance and capacity testing to contextualize their environment’s ability to perform when it matters most. NetFlow’s ability to provide contextual insights based on live and historic data means Network Operation Centers (NOCs)  are able to react to immediate performance hindrances and also predict with a fair level of accuracy what the challenges of tomorrow may hold. And this is worth gold in the context of the ever-changing and expanding networking landscape.

8 Keys to Understanding NetFlow for Network Security, Performance & Overall IT Health

Benefits of a NetFlow Performance Deployment in Complex Environments

Since no two environments are identical and no network remains stagnant in Network Monitoring today, the only thing we can expect is the unexpected!

The network has become a living dynamic and complex environment that requires a flexible approach to monitor and analyze. Network and Security teams are under pressure to go beyond simple monitoring techniques to quickly identify the root causes of issues, de-risk hidden threats and to monitor network-connected things.

A solution’s flexibility refers to not only its interface but also the overall design.

From a user interface perspective, flexibility refers to the ability to perform analysis on any combination of data fields with multiple options to view, sort, cut and count the analysis.

From a deployment perspective, flexibility means options for deployment on Linux or Windows environments and the ability to digest all traffic or scale collection with tuning techniques that don’t fully obfuscate the data.

Acquiring flexible tools are a superb investment as they enrich and facilitate local knowledge retention. They enable multiple network centric teams to benefit from a shared toolset and the business begins to leverage the power of big data Predictive AI Baselining analytics that, over time, grows and extends beyond the tool’s original requirements as new information becomes visible.

What makes a Network Management System (NMS) truly scalable is its ability to analyze all the far reaches of the enterprise using a single interface with all layers of complexity to the data abstracted.

NetFlow, sFlow, IPFIX and their variants are all about abstracting routers, switches, firewalls or taps from multiple vendors into a single searchable network intelligence.

It is critical to ensure that abstraction layers are independently scalable to enable efficient collection and be sufficiently flexible to enable multiple deployment architectures to provide low-impact, cost-effective solutions that are simple to deploy and manage.

To simplify deployment and management it has to work out the box and be self-configuring and self-healing. Many flow monitoring systems require a lot of time to configure or maintain making them expensive to deploy and hard to use.

A flow-based NMS needs to meet various alerting, Predictive AI Baselining analytics, and architectural deployment demands. It needs to adapt to rapid change, pressure on enterprise infrastructure and possess the agility needed to adapt at short notice.

Agility in provisioning services, rectifying issues, customizing and delivering alerts and reports and facilitating template creation, early threat detection and effective risk mitigation, all assist in propelling the business forward and are the hallmarks of a flexible network management methodology.

Here are some examples that require a flexible approach to network monitoring:

  • DDoS attack behavior changes randomly
  • Analyze Interface usage by Device by Datacenter by Region
  • A new unknown social networking application suddenly becomes popular
  • Compliance drives need to discover Insider threats and data leakages occurring under the radar
  • Companies grow and move offices and functions
  • Laws change requiring data retention suitable for legal compliance
  • New processes create new unplanned pressures
  • New applications cause unexpected data surges
  • A vetted application creates unanticipated denials of service
  • Systems and services become infected with new kinds of malicious agents
  • Virtualization demands abruptly increase
  • Services and resources require a bit tax or 95th percentile billing model
  • Analyzing flexible NetFlow fields supported by different device vendors such as IPv6, MPLS, MAC, BGP, VPN, NAT paths, DNS, URL, Latency etc.
  • Internet of Things (IoT) become part of the network ecosystem and require ongoing visibility to manage

Performance Monitoring & Security Forensics: The 1-2 Punch for Network and IT Infrastructure Visibility