Top Benefits to Enable NBAR2 Monitoring with LiveNX
Application visibility is a key component for any customer who is managing his or her network. No longer is it sufficient to just inspect port and protocol traffic. Instead, in today’s modern networks, we need to be able to pick apart the packet and see information beyond just port 80 or 443. That’s why Cisco’s Next Generation NBAR (NBAR2) is critical. NBAR2 provides a depth of application recognition that wasn’t available in the original NBAR. Now, being able to see applications in the network like Skype, Office 365 and FaceTime is even easier.
What Happens without Application Awareness?
With so much reliance on cloud or web-based applications, it can be very difficult to gain insight into the types of traffic that travels through your network. Many of your users might rely on Salesforce or Office 365 for their day-to-day activities. Unfortunately, they may also rely on YouTube or Facebook a little more than they should. Without some form of application awareness on the network it becomes impossible to differentiate this traffic.
NOTE: Instead of just looking at all voice traffic or video traffic, customers are now able to differentiate between different vendors, like Google Hangouts, FaceTime, or Skype.
Combining NBAR2, NetFlow and LiveNX
Leveraging Cisco’s NBAR2, you can glean a level of granularity that you didn’t have before. When customers combine that with NetFlow and LiveNX, the power you will unlock is incredible! You will be able to visualize the path across the network from a user to a destination and focus in on just the relevant traffic in a much easier and faster way. You can find all the PeopleSoft traffic in the network and make sure that it is properly handled from a Quality of Service (QoS) perspective as well.
Increase Productivity with Application Visibility
On the historical side of things, LiveNX can build reports to provide insight into the usage of any of the over 1000+ applications that are recognized by NBAR2. Application reports can be generated and emailed to the team or managers who might want to review the traffic, or find out who is using a specific application. If someone finds out that Facebook usage is high for a team that doesn’t use it as part of their job, then steps can be taken to manage that traffic properly. Reporting also allows customers to better gauge the health of their network and ensure that they are providing enough bandwidth to their most critical and important traffic.
Consider and Enable NBAR2 Monitoring
As more of our data moves to the cloud and we rely on the web for these things, it becomes important to see this traffic on an application level. With NBAR2 that becomes even easier. If you haven’t already enabled NBAR2 on your devices I highly encourage it, so you can gain a new level of understanding when it comes to your network.
For more information on NBAR2 be sure to check out Cisco’s Q&A on the subject: http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/products/collateral/ios-nx-os-software/network-based-application-recognition-nbar/qa_c67-697963.html
For the latest NBAR2 Protocol Packs, please visit: http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/td/docs/ios-xml/ios/qos_nbar/prot_lib/config_library/nbar-prot-pack-library.html
Author: Walter Driskell, Sales Engineer
