Cisco and ManageEngine to jointly present a webinar on Media Monitoring

With video conferencing and video calls becoming a part of day-to-day business activities in an enterprise, there are a lot of performance issues associated with it & it is time to prepare the networks to handle media traffic with optimized bandwidth usage without compromising on the quality.

Cisco Medianet is helpful in troubleshooting all media related issues and it enhances video and application experiences. It not only enhances video quality but also optimized bandwidth and efficiency thereby cutting costs. 

ManageEngine NetFlow Analyzer has introduced medianet monitoring which leverages on Cisco Medianet. Medianet reports give vital information pertaining to performance of media-rich applications like rich media volume, jitter, packets lost etc. Monitoring these parameters is very important since it is these factors that affect the quality of the video that is delivered. 

The joint webinar from Cisco & ManageEngine, titled “Cisco Medianet Media Monitoring – Accelerate troubleshooting and Cut Costs” would enlighten you about Cisco Medianet as a technology, what difference it could make to your network, the benefits that you would derive and the cost-effectiveness of the technology. Apart from that, there will be a brief account of NetFlow Analyzer Medianet reporting feature. The details about the webinar are:

Title: Cisco Medianet Media Monitoring – Accelerate troubleshooting and Cut costs

Presenters:       Patricia Costa, Product Manager, Network Software & system technology group, Cisco

                        Don Thomas Jacob, Technical marketing Engineer, ManageEngine

Date: December 6^th , Tuesday

Time: 11 am Eastern Standard time

Registration : Please click here

Some more screenshots!!!!!

This is the fresh face of NetFlow Analyzer:

One of the most coveted & much sought after network traffic analytics product, NetFlow Analyzer from ManageEngine has borne a traditional face as far as their user interface is concerned since the inception of the product. From the features perspective, NetFlow Analyzer has progressed by leaps & bounds by incorporating so many features out-of-the-box in alignment with major technology alliances with giants like Cisco and it also ventured into security analytics as part of the product. It emerged as the first ever product in its league to introduce WAAS reporting & it also scaled new heights in detecting security anomalies based on network behavior. Despite all of these breakthroughs, the face of NetFlow Analyzer(the UI) was still very traditional.

Breaking tradition for the first time, NetFlow Analyzer is all set to take off to a completely different level with a fresh face & some exciting features which a whole lot of products in its league are yet to even think about. The new UI is here & a little bird managed to get a glimpse of how the new UI of NetFlow Analyzer looks like. Here it is, for the first time ever, before the world sees the new face of NetFlow Analyzer.

It looks like the motive behind it is to give the end user an enhanced & an even more aesthetically appealing environment which would be one another compelling reason for the customers to choose NetFlow Analyzer not just for its features but also for its user friendliness.

The first glimpse!!!!!

Here are some screenshots from NetFlow Analyzer's new UI!

     

Here are some more for you to see(before the rest of the World does!! :P )

   

Healthcare & Netflow Analyzer

Healthcare industry has totally different face today than what it had ten years ago. 10 years ago, if one had spoken of IT Departments in the hospital, he would have been transported to the psychology department for sure for diagnosis. But, today, a hospital without an IT department is practically impossible to survive.

And in such a network dependent environment, imagine what would happen if there is going to be some network slowdown. Chaos is all that would remain. Patient Monitoring systems, The hospital database, Patient records, profiles, appointments, schedules etc. All of these have connectivity to the network & any compromise on network security would result in irreparable damage to the hospital.

It is therefore very important to allocate sufficient bandwidth to applications that are vital and prioritize applications according to the severity of its importance. When the surgeon isn't going to have access to vital patient information through the network at the right time, that would lead to the patient not getting the best treatment(both as a person & a patient). When the receptionist isn't able to get access to the software dealing with appointment schedules, that again is going to disturb work flow.

A tool to efficiently manage available bandwidth is essential in this case. Netflow Analyzer has features that are suitable to monitor bandwidth in an environment as critical as this one & traffic reports up to a very minute level of granularity can be obtained. Thus, healthcare institutions can thus benefit from these reports to prioritize bandwidth for business critical applications.

Download the trial version here.

Retail stores & Netflow Analyzer

Netflow analyzer is a boon to ensure optimum bandwidth usage in networks irrespective of their size. Networks have gained prominence and priority in our lives and we largely depend on them for a variety of reasons. In this blog, I would explain how this technology could be used in the retail industry.

It is not uncommon to see stores like Lulu, Big Bazaar and Wal-Mart and they deal with huge amounts of data running on their networks. An interesting article on Reader's Digest even spoke about how much they were investing on something called Queue management algorithms. Everything right from managing the stock of products to bar coding them to logistics to monitoring through surveillance cameras  is dependent on the network. Each operation is definitely going to consume bandwidth and they have a huge reach. For example, there is a chain of such retail outlets in one single city. This way there are several chains across an entire state or a country. This makes the amount of data handled huge. And most of this data needs to be accessible from one central location to ensure smooth running of the business and quick troubleshooting of issues that are likely to occur at any of these points.

So, the vitality of the network in this case cannot be ignored. A small glitch could lead to chaos at a large scale leading to frustration levels soaring high. A network slowdown could result in credit card payments getting rejected, delayed billing, long queues and ultimately overall chaos. So, the retailer cannot afford to make the mistake of choosing not to ensure proper network operation.

To get proper visibility into the network one needs a tool that would give a clear picture about how the network is being used. With Netflow Analyzer, it is possible to drill down to the root of all these issues and get information about top talkers, top applications, top protocols etc. upto a granularity of one minute. This information thus gives a lot scope for identifying traffic patterns. In case of a retail store, IP grouping option could be used to set up separate groups. For example, the IP addresses of the machines used for billing alone could be grouped together and the traffic pattern could give valuable insights into sales trends during different hours in a day. That way, the policies could be fine-tuned and better customer management policies could be brought in. If the traffic exceeds a particular limit during late evenings, additional billing machines could be added for those couple of hours alone leading to better queue management.

Thus, netflow analyzer becomes a very affordable solution to problems arising out of a problematic retail network and the ROI is guaranteed.

To download and try it free of cost with all its features for 30 days, click here.

Lessons from a giant

With enterprises becoming largely dependent on their networks, ensuring security and preventing anomalies in these networks is nothing short of a Herculian task for a network engineer. A network is subject to a whole lot attacks varying in forms and the impacts it could have on the network. We are aware of the fact that, a lot of companies offer online services and they require sensitive information like credit card numbers and Tax Identification numbers to be transmitted through their networks. An attack on the company's network that transmits sensitive data of a huge customer base is something that would not just leave the company at loss of customer reputation and financial loss, but also invite legal hurdles for compromising sensitive information which could affect thousands of its customers. Overall, the consequences of a network attack are very damaging and it is in the hands of the network engineer to secure the network and constantly monitor the health of the network.

And the engineer does not have all the sweet time in the world for ensuring this. There is always a rush and it is very much possible to overlook the security aspect of the network despite the consequences, in the rush for innovation. This rush for innovating is certainly important in a dynamic market where-in, the slightest delay could make one lose the competitive edge. So, what at all could a company do to prevent ending up at crossroads? The need of the hour is a clear and an uncompromising view of the security snapshot of the network. Not just that! Time is the most vital factor here. If there is way to check out the overall security posture view of the network in one quick glance! EUREKA! ASAM is here!

This is exactly what ASAM does. The Advanced Security Analytics Module(ASAM) is an add-on of Netflow Analyzer, which was developed keeping in mind, these kind of network attacks. A couple of years ago, this would have been too much of an exaggeration to think of an attack of this magnitude, but then, the entire world is witnessing such threats today. It is high time that companies that handle sensitive data, that could affect millions of users,and pay some serious attention in this direction. By incorporating ASAM, which uses the state-of-the-art Continuous Stream Mining Engine technology, that has some exceptional technical abilities, it would be a much easier way to get an overall network security snapshot. This would greatly prevent these kind of security breaches. 

Apart from keeping the network away from these breaches, there is more that one could expect out of it. First of all, there is a security snapshot of the network, that helps in grouping problems into various classes. This would enable a systematic method of solving these issues quickly and hence reduce recovery time.

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                                                              Secondly, there is a feature called the security event list box, that specifically enlists a list of offenders, targets and routing interfaces invloved at the time of occurance. Apart from this, it creates a unique event id, severity and status of incident management. This simplifies the work of the troubleshooter a great deal, thereby letting him think of solutions rather than breaking his head with identifying the problems and grouping them.

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                                             And thats not all.                                             Thirdly, there is an event details report that enlists the unique hosts, ports, protocol, tcpflags and a host of other details(which are available here)

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                                            This way the overall security aspect of the network is taken care of and it does not require too much time. A quick insight into the entire network is thus very effective in preventing breaches and this is totally something that companies need to make absolute use of to prevent such unfortunate security incidents and to keep up the good work that they are doing, at a very nominal cost. The ASAM add-on comes along with the 30-day free (trial) edition of the Netflow Analyzer 9(the latest version) which you can download from here.

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