NetFlow Analyzer: Cisco Application Visibility and Control

The traditional analysis using NetFlow on application visibility was primarily based on port and protocol information. The monitoring software identifies applications as HTTP, HTTPS and SMTP etc. based on mapping well-known ports and protocols.

Today, most applications use random ports and also use well-known ports like 80 and 443, thus making the traditional port and protocol analysis, which was based upon layer 3 information not very helpful in terms of proving the deep visibility that was needed to provide on the exact application which is consuming bandwidth.

Cisco AVC:

Cisco Application Visibility and Control is the combination of multiple technologies which found in the Cisco ASR 1000 series and Cisco Integrated Service router generation 2 (G2). Cisco AVC allows network administrators to identify the application traffic utilization and its performance on their network. Administrator can define policies to derive maximum performance on their business-critical applications and control resource usage on the network.

Cisco AVC is capable of:

1.       Providing better application visibility
2.       Monitoring network performance
3.       Managing the network in a better way
4.       Providing better control on the network to the administrator

Application Visibility:

Cisco AVC uses next generation deep packet inspection (DPI) technology called NBAR2 (Network Based Application Recognition 2) to identify more than 1000 applications and its subcategories.

With NBAR2, Administrator gets much deeper visibility on application traffic usage like URLs visited and it also helps categorizes application based on similar functionalities like email(Gmail, Yahoo etc),browsing etc.

NBAR2 also helps administrator to group the applications based on its brand like Microsoft, Cisco, Citrix etc. It also identifies applications peer-to-peer applications, encrypted ones etc.

Performance Monitoring:

Using Flexible NetFlow (FNF), all the application traffic utilization and its performance metrics like jitter, packet loss, latency and ART (Application Response time) etc. can be exported to the network management software for generating network utilization report and perform capacity planning.

Flexible NetFlow aids the user to export performance data of TCP applications and media-rich information like voice and video. QoS policies and its classes are also exported in NetFlow packets, so that one can identify whether the intended applications are under the right QoS policies applied on the router.

Network Management:

Based on the performance monitoring, the network administrator can deploy policies on their network to improve the performance of business-critical applications.

Control:

Cisco Performance routing(PfR) allows administrator to select the most intelligent path for business-critical application to attain maximum performance.

Advantages of Cisco AVC:

Identifies over 1000 applications along with its category
Provides performance metrics such as jitter, packet loss, latency and ART etc .
Identifies the QoS policies applied for applications and also allows one to modify them
Dynamically choosing the network path based on performance data
Improves the user experience in application usage.
Helps in better capacity planning, by providing deeper visibility on application usage and performance.
Faster troubleshooting and lesser network downtime.
Helps reducing the operational cost through network optimization.