Using NetFlow for Network Capacity Planning
Summary of information on this page:
Optimize Network Resources
The nGenius Performance Manager for NetFlow is a vital tool for helping enterprises manage and optimize their network resources. It provides the flexibility to:
- Monitor and justify capacity growth by quantifying and qualifying your traffic
- Identify business applications versus applications used for recreational purposes
- Monitor QoS classes to optimize use of expensive bandwidth by ensuring mission-critical or latency-sensitive applications receive top priority
The Need for Application-Aware Capacity Planning
Network capacity planning is about balancing the needs and expectations of your network users with the realities of budgeting. To manage network capacity efficiently, it’s not enough to measure overall traffic utilization, you need insight into what applications are using the link, when those applications are active, and who is using those applications.
With NetFlow-based application usage information, network “slowdowns” can be traced back to actual applications and their users. This enables IT to ensure available bandwidth is used efficiently for business applications. For example, IT can determine if a particular spike in network traffic between two remote offices is due to a legitimate business need or to recreational use of the network, such as exchanging emails with large attachments, for example, photos from the recent sales meeting.
NetFlow and QoS Monitoring
NetFlow records include the Type of Service bits used to prioritize applications within a particular Quality of Service class. From a capacity planning standpoint, deploying QoS uniformly across the network protects important real-time voice and video and/or mission-critical applications, guaranteeing bandwidth and ensuring low latency during occasional traffic spikes. It is especially important to manage QoS categories when using MPLS, VPN or ATM technologies to ensure proper application performance without overspending for a particular class of service. Using the NetScout Solution to analyze NetFlow QoS data captured from all appropriate network devices provides the added measure of protection needed to make capacity planning fully effective.
Business-Based Network Capacity Planning with the NetScout Solution
With the nGenius Performance Manager for NetFlow you can report on and analyze growth trends and usage patterns using NetFlow datagrams captured from your routers and switches in order to make decisions about optimizing bandwidth, prioritizing traffic, rescheduling activities, reallocating traffic, or even creating usage policies. In addition to enterprise-wide baselines and forecasts, nGenius goes beyond basic utilization to identify the applications that consume bandwidth, providing the justification for capacity upgrades and keeping your budget in check.
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| nGenius Reports contain a Capacity Planning section, which automatically trends data for data link, network, host and application-layer utilization with an integrated baseline of activity, as well as a Situations To Watch section, which further helps in capacity planning by looking at growing trends in the network and making predictions against segments and circuits.
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Related Documents
Enabling Products
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