Monitoring Your Network Traffic With Interactive Reports - Overview

1. Select ‘Interactive Reports’ from the top tabbed menu.
2. Click on ‘Top Applications’ from the list of available Network Views.
3. Expand the tree view of traffic classes in the network connection or link.
4. For the time period select ‘Live View’.

• Note in the diagram in the red rectangle that Inbound is selected.
• The time period of the graph and table is 1 minute. It is the same period of time as seen in the Activity views X-axis. The graph and table are updated every 3 seconds showing the composition of the network traffic as it is currently flowing.

Doing the previous steps will help you get familiar with Interactive Reports. Interactive Reports enable users to examine the network traffic characteristics of volume, throughput and round-trip time of the link as a whole or of specific traffic defined by traffic classes. See the composition of network traffic with pie graphs according to IP address, port number, protocol type, application, user, and HTTP domain. View these as the network traffic is currently flowing or historical data. Display data one year at a time or zoom down to one data point per second resolution, the granularity of data collection.

The tree view of traffic classes on the bottom left-hand side show traffic classes as defined by the currently activated policy. It may be the default policy which has pre-defined classes of regular network traffic types such as Web, Email (i.e SMTP, POP3 & IMAP), SSH, File Transfer, Remote Desktop and Network Services (DNS, NTP, SNMP). View a single traffic class, group of classes or the whole network traffic traveling over the link. More traffic classes such as Citrix, VoIP (SIP), Kerboros, CRM & ERP can be added by using the policy editor to suit your specific network diagnosis needs. Policies that give a Unix perspective rather than a Microsoft one can be provided as they both use common network protocols.

The NetScope web-based interface makes diagnosis easier with drill-down (clickable pie-graph segments) and select-box zooming.

In the top left-hand menu are the options to display the various information about the network packets listed under the title ‘Network Views’. For instance, Top Applications shows a pie graph and a table of the top applications transmitting and receiving network traffic in order of traffic volume per time period. Also ‘Top HTTP Domains’ displays the top domain names being accessed with HTTP in order of traffic volume per time period. In other words, in most cases, which are the top web addresses (urls) being accessed by web browsers. ‘User Performance (RTT)’ displays the round-trip time of each traffic flow. This is the time taken between sending the packet to receiving acknowledgment that the packet has arrived safely. These views and the others are explained in more detail in the knowledge base articles under the ‘Network Views’ category.