Diving Deeper with NetFlow – Tips and Tricks! – Part Six!
Welcome to SolarWinds blog series “Diving Deeper with NetFlow – Tips and Tricks”. This is the last part of the 6 part series where you can learn new tips by understanding more about NetFlow and some use cases for effective network monitoring.
In the previous blog, we had discussed about Quality of Service (QoS) and how you can implement QoS polices across your network by analyzing the data from NetFlow. In this blog, we will dive into capacity planning using NetFlow and understand its impact in scaling up your network.
NetFlow helps administrators plan network capacity more accurately—by deploying greater bandwidth for advanced networking services—as organizations scale up. Using NetFlow, one can easily check if bandwidth growth is aligned with resources utilized in the current environment and plan for the future. This will allow network managers to more easily monitor bandwidth consumed by applications.
Capacity planning using NetFlow can also help network administrators implement QoS policies and prioritize mission critical applications by characterizing traffic. By distinguishing different types of network traffic like voice, email and other applications, administrators can analyze and understand the QoS policies they have implemented. Top applications and conversations based on NetFlow data can be stored for reference unlike PCAP, which requires extensive storage.
Capacity Planning will help enterprises collect more NetFlow historical data and compare the trends with the organization’s network. This helps to allow enough bandwidth for business critical applications and prevent any anomalies to enter the network. Having NetFlow for capacity planning will also assist in scaling up the network according to needs and utilize the available bandwidth in a better way, ensuring good resource alignment and capacity planning.
Using NetFlow Traffic Analyzer, you can store aggregated historical network traffic data which will give you an additional help need during the process of capacity planning in your network environment. Scaling up based on network requirement and implementing QoS policies becomes much easier by having relevant network information while operating at an enterprise level environment.
To learn more about NetFlow, check out our NetFlow V9 Datagram Knowledge Series.
Watch the entire ‘Diving Deeper with NetFlow – Tips and Tricks’ webcast here and become an expert in understanding and implementing NetFlow in your enterprise networks.
Download a free fully functional 30-day trial of SolarWinds Bandwidth Analyzer Pack.
