What is Network Flow Analysis?
Network traffic is the amount of data traveling across the network at any given point in time. The data traffic is made of data packets that are sent over the network. The network traffic has a flow of the data through various interfaces, and that is why monitoring this traffic is also called Flow Analysis.
There are two directional flows in the network traffic, north-south, and east-west. The traffic affects the health of the network. The unusual and high traffic can slow down the speed or the services that depend on the network. The network traffic also shows how much the secure the network is. Unusual high traffic can be due to an attack.
Monitor & Analyze Your Network Flow Traffic
A lot of activities occur throughout the network environment at any given point. And these activities manage and control the health of the network and overall network traffic. Here are a few practices/tools that help monitor and analyze your network traffic.
- NetFlow Analyzer: Netflow Analyzer is an analytic tool that provides real-time information about the network’s bandwidth and availability. Netflow Analyzer, a bandwidth monitoring tool, is quite popular and widely used by most organizations.It is a unified solution that collects the network details and analyzes and provides reports about network bandwidth utilization.
- NetFlow Tools: A handful of features and ability to understand the network traffic flow, the behavior of the IP address, network performance, and health. The Netflow Tool helps monitor, analyze, troubleshoot, and introspect the network traffic and flow.In addition, the Netflow tools can secure the network by detecting Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks and anonymous activities. It can also detect unauthorized WAN traffic.
Enterprise-Grade Network Traffic Monitoring
There can be various reasons behind monitoring the network traffic. When it comes to IT infrastructures, it comes with N number of priorities and behavioral reasons behind monitoring the network traffic. Here are a few practices while adopting AIOps that are followed by IT enterprises.
- N-Level Drill down: Drill down your flow data to the deepest possible level. Track critical transactions and time consumed on each step of critical conversation.
- Scalable and Flexible: Supports multiple flow analysis protocols, including NetFlow v5 and v9, sFlow, IPFIX. Collect network traffic data from multiple layers.
- Forecasting Behavior: From the collected pattern behavior, forecasting the future network’s health and behavior. Alerting the system admin about the potential errors and securing the network before the issues cause any damage.
- Application Insight and Profiling: Insights into the application’s health and activity. Profiles the malicious traffic patterns. These network traffic profiles are generated through PCAP (Packet Capture) analysis.
How to Monitor Network Traffic?
To optimize the practice of monitoring the network traffic, it is important to prioritize and strategize the metrics to monitor. Here are a few best practices for monitoring Network Traffic.
- Capture all Conversations: Capture, view, log and analyze all the data passing through your network. Detects every network activity and application usage of the system’s ports.
- Bandwidth Used per User: AIOps churns bandwidth usage down to individuals. Keep a close eye on network bandwidth usage and detect the excessive use of bandwidth.
- Deep Insight into NetFlow: A protocol developed by Cisco systems is used to collect the metadata of the IP traffic flowing across the network. Devices with NetFlow enabled generate the metadata and send it to the flow collectors. Then, a network operator uses the NetFlow data to determine packet loss, network performance, and traffic congestion.
- Application Traffic Issues: Identify applications causing network traffic performance issues. Detect applications with higher bandwidth usage to avoid bandwidth outage.
- End-to-End Traffic including WAN: Unified visibility from network to end-user. Get the complete picture with end-to-end traffic visibility. Gain a holistic view of traffic trends.
Monitor Network Traffic with AIOps
AIOps powered by Motadata uses Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning technologies, making it an intelligent and advanced monitoring tool. Ensuring your network’s better health, maintaining a healthy traffic flow, and securing the network from malicious activities.
AIOps not only monitors but also builds one robust and smart network management system. It supports Netflow (versions: v5, v9), IPFix, sFlow and JFlow. Feel free to reach out to us at sales@motadata.com to know more.