Managing a company network is a bit like performing in a high wire act. To do it right takes a great deal of balance. On one hand you have the availability, service level, and performance needs of your company, management and users. And on the other hand you have a tight IT budget to deliver on all their expectations. In a perfect world, you could walk the high wire with ease, perfectly balanced and the company network would hum along effortlessly delivering exactly the level of service required. Unfortunately, something always throws a wrench into the picture – bringing the company network to a bumpy crawl and some rough weather for you on the wire.
Who or what is the top offender? Possibly an over-utilized network.
But how did this happen?
You know that the bandwidth from your ISP should be plenty for your organization. You’d even planned for network spikes and have a safety margin built in. All device monitors seem to be green. Yet your users complain your network is slow. Maybe you can afford to add more bandwidth – but there is perhaps one more step for you to take before you do that. You can know how your network is being used.
Flow Monitor Helps Ensure Network Performance and QoS
Our solution to your balancing act – is the WhatsUp Gold Flow Monitor. Available as a fully integrated plug-in to WhatsUp Gold, Flow Monitor provides detailed insight into exactly how your network bandwidth and capacity are utilized. Flow Monitor not only highlights the overall utilization of the LAN, WAN, specific device, or interface, it also indicates which users, applications and protocols are consuming the bandwidth. And for business critical applications, Flow Monitor enables you to easily conduct traffic identification and analysis, as well as verify Quality of Service (QoS) through ToS, or DSCP for the LAN/WAN.
With WhatsUp Gold Flow Monitor, you can ensure application performance and save money, by eliminating costly bandwidth utilization issues.
With WhatsUp Gold Flow Monitor you can:
Key features of the WhatsUp Gold Flow Monitor include:
Support for Popular Flow Formats
In a single plug-in, Flow Monitor offers support for all the popular flow management formats, including NetFlow, sFlow and J-Flow. With such extensive flow format support, you can utilize Flow Monitor using your existing infrastructure – no need to upgrade. Flow Monitor works with an extensive list of switches and routers from vendors such as Cisco, Extreme, Juniper, HP, and many more.
Flow Monitor also collects NetFlow compliant records from WhatsUp Flow Publisher – through which it provides visibility into application, host and user traffic across all non-flow capable devices.
Visibility into Network Bandwidth Utilization
Attempting to diagnose a slow network without visibility into QoS and exactly what traffic is causing the problem, is really only seeing a tiny part of the picture. With WhatsUp Gold’s Flow Monitor, you have the complete real-time visibility you need to manage bandwidth utilization and ensure optimal network performance.
Comprehensive Reporting
Flow Monitor collects NetFlow, sFlow and J-Flow records from routers and switches and converts them into useful reports which track real-time usage as well as historical trends. Additionally, 95th percentile reports provide the capability to verify service providers’ burstable billing records.
Threshold Based Alerting
In conjunction with the new Alert Center, Flow Monitor makes it easy to find out exactly where and when problems may develop. You can now set up multiple configurable thresholds tracking the volume of traffic between conversation pairs, failed connections per host, top senders and receivers, and specific interfaces over time. Custom configurable thresholds provide even more granular tracking of network traffic. With the combined Flow Monitor and WhatsUp Gold solution, alerts are sent when the configured thresholds are exceeded, enabling network managers to proactively troubleshoot and resolve performance bottlenecks and eliminate malicious network behavior.