Yes. NetScope has the ability to filter traffic into traffic classes based on website domain names. This enables you then to guarantee traffic (i.e shape traffic) to important websites such as salesforce, workbooks, Insightly, Google apps and Teamviewer.
Create web-based traffic classes using the following simple steps in this given example (if using Policy Editor for the first time see also ‘Creating and Editing Traffic Classes‘) :
- Use the ‘Policy Manager’ to duplicate the ‘MonitoringPolicy’, a policy example that comes with Netscope.
- Open the copied policy and rename the policy within the Policy Summary window. An example would be ‘MyMonitoringPolicy’.
- On the left-hand side menu select where you would like the traffic class to sit, for example under the ‘web’ traffic class.
- Click ‘New’ to create a new class and name your new traffic class- for example ‘Salesforce’.
- On the inbound section for your new traffic class click ‘Add Traffic Filter’ and enter the domain name- for example ‘.*salesforce.com’ (wild cards are used in this case to match any subdomain under the salesforce.com domain. See ‘Matching Domains with Regular Expressions’ for more information). You do not need to do the same for the outbound direction, this is done automatically.
- Now select the ‘Activation’ button to make your policy go live.
- You should now see all traffic going to and from the domain you specified falling into the new traffic class.
Once you have created traffic classes that match the website domain names that you are interested in, convert the monitoring policy into a shaping policy so that you can guarantee or limit traffic to those websites. Here you can guarantee traffic to important websites, limit traffic drain from less important websites, and completely block nuisance websites. To learn how to do this see ‘Creating a Shaping Policy‘.
This website based traffic shaping mechanism enables NetScope and yourself to keep pace with the complexity of the big cloud-based service providers such as salesforce, Google apps and Insightly. Now that cloud-based services use dynamic ranging sub domains it would be next to impossible to shape based solely on IP addresses. With website domain-based traffic shaping you can guarantee cloud-based managed services easily.