WhatsUp Flow Monitor

Visualize network bandwidth utilization by users, hosts, and applications

As a network manager, you spend a good portion of your time discovering and mapping your network, overseeing the performance of your applications and underlying physical or virtualized infrastructure, troubleshooting problems and managing alerts, or simply sharing information and reports with all major stakeholders. But, did you know that the best way to resolve intermittent network performance problems and ensure Quality of Service is to analyze, understand and manage IP traffic over your network?

Analyze and manage network and application traffic and bandwidth use with 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 and by whom. 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, DSCP for the LAN/WAN, or new Top NBAR and CBQoS reports.

With WhatsUp Gold Flow Monitor, you can ensure application performance, oversee network traffic prioritization policies, and save money by eliminating costly bandwidth utilization issues.

Flow Monitoring Basics

• Support for Cisco’s NetFlow v1, v5, v9; sFlow v5; Juniper Network’s J-Flow format, standard IPFIX and Cisco NSEL (Network Security Event Logging) formats
• Dedicated SQL Server database
• Extensive support for switches and routers from Cisco, Juniper, Foundry, Extreme, Enterasys and Packeteer

Monitoring/Troubleshooting Capabilities

• Automatic classification of traffic by type and protocol in real-time, including NBAR traffic
• Identification of traffic flow patterns through the network in real-time
• Identification of traffic sources (top talkers) and destinations
• Identification of traffic destination by group, domain, top level domain (TLD), and country
• Pinpointing of internal and external traffic sources and destinations
• Conducting traffic identification and analysis for LAN and WAN for Quality of Service through ToS or DSCP
• Grouping of flow data based on common parameters, including IP addresses by domain, TLD or country
• Grouping of flow data based on source or port so flows may be mapped to business structures, applications, and organizations.
• Automatic identification of high traffic flows to un-monitored ports and highlighting of those ports as
  candidates for monitoring
• Exposure of unauthorized applications, including file and music sharing
• Detection of failed connections

Reporting

• Access to 21 flow management reports via WhatsUp Gold web console
• Automated rollup of flow data with hourly, daily, weekly, monthly and yearly views
• User configuration of all reports to display flow information in custom formats
• Sorts and displays filtered reports by protocol, application, host, domain, TLD, country, groups or type of service
• Integration of flow reports with WhatsUp Gold dashboard reports
• Access to WHOIS information for sender and receiver reports
• Display traffic information by bytes, packets or flows
• 95th percentile reporting within the Interface Overview reports
• New Top NBAR Applications and Class based QoS reports

Configuration and Management

• Automatic discovery and configuration of flow sources via SNMP
• Automatic tuning and filtering of “noise flows” so important flows are accurately reported with greater performance and flexibility
• Configuration of role based management for user access to configuration and reports
• Configuration and management of flow data retention policies
• Configuration of flow logging levels
• Configurable support for non-standard ports and proprietary protocols
• Starting and stopping of flow services
• Setting of address resolution levels
• Access to flow database and service status, providing instant views of database parameters and running flow services
• Backup and restoration of flow database
• Apply custom names to flow interfaces
• Notification of database status
  

WhatsUp Gold Flow Monitor has the same base system requirements as WhatsUp Gold. In addition, WhatsUp Gold Flow Monitor requires:

• WhatsUp Gold v15 or greater Premium, Standard, Distributed or MSP Edition
• At least one networking device that support flow monitoring
• SQL Server 2005 Standard or Enterprise Edition (recommended)

Note: WhatsUp Gold Flow Monitor is more demanding on the database than WhatsUp Gold. While WhatsUp Gold Flow Monitor can successfully use SQL Server 2005 Express, we recommend either MS SQL Server 2005 Standard or Enterprise Edition for best performance.

• An additional 2 to 4 GB RAM recommended
• 16 GB (required) to 22 GB (recommended) hard disk space for the databases
• Note: If using Microsoft® SQL Server® 2005, the database size is limited by available hard disk space.