In today's world where more and more emphasis is laid on cutting costs, it just doesn't sound good if your network center turns up being the "Cost Center". Very often a network glitch is mistaken for a shortage and more bandwidth is provisioned. If a tool could present the network manager with long-term link usage patterns, the IT manager can take a more informed decision.
Scenario:
An IT manager based in New York headquarters notices consistently high utilization on one of his core links. He is considering a link upgrade, which can cost him up to $ 140,000.
He logs into the NetFlow Analyzer to check the traffic pattern on that link and does see a consistent increase in the overall link utilization over the last 6 months.
He then looks at the overall application distribution for this period and sees that the increase in this link utilization has been contributed almost entirely due to the http and https traffic that he diverted through this link from another link towards the end of May 2007. Most of the other applications are not using much more than their baselined levels.
He also notices that the other link is still relatively under utilized and that he can safely re-route the http and https traffic back through the same link, thereby saving $140,000 in link upgrade costs.
As a network manager you need to be on top of your network to be in control of the day-to-day happenings in your network. Especially, with more and more businesses being increasingly dependent on the internet, it is very vital that you are in total control of your network.Any network outage has to be quickly attended to and fixed right away. More importantly any network incidents has to be pro-actively attended to. NetFlow Analyzer with its proactive alerting mechanisms ensure that you are informed of any network exceptions as it happens. Also the drill down features let you quickly pin down the cause of any network problems and troubleshoot faster.
It is also very essential that you ensure your business critical applications are not starved off bandwidth while non-critical activities like music downloads hog the available bandwidth. By giving you an indepth visibility in to your network and the bandwidth usage statistics you can appropriately set QoS policies. It is also possible to categorize applications that consume bandwidth by port, protocol and IP address. This way you can be fully empowered to ensure that the business critical applications always have the required bandwidth.
As a network administrator you need to have all the reports to take the right decision. Especially when it comes to bandwidth capacity planning decisions the stakes involved are high and even a small mistake can cost huge money. NetFlow Analyzer with its long range historical reporting lets you take the right decisions. Also as a network administrator you need to have periodic reporting to understand how the network is performing. NetFlow Analyzer's automatic report generation feature at scheduled time periods help you with just that.
Should you need any specific information at any point in time, you could just access the application for a quick snapshot. NetFlow Analyzer's dashboard presnet you with all the vital metrics you need to eb aware on as an administrator. You could drill down on it for any further infromation on any specific element of your network.
