Managing Internet & WAN for business
Monitor any application's performance at a glance
There are certain applications in business that don't tolerate delays well. Users of applications such as your CRM, ERP, voice over IP or video conferencing suffer when there are delays. It is crucial therefore to detect any delays with these services. When monitoring application Internet activity, granularity is a crucial metric.
In this example we can see that the CRM app has large delays (round trip times or RTT). Anything higher than 200ms may result in complaints from users.
Stop application delays with Quality of Service (QoS)
Implementing QoS (packet shaping) rules is a quick way to reduce the latency that users might experiencing with an application. In the example below we have implemented traffic shaping on the CRM and decreased the delays. You can read more about QoS here.
Notice the delays are greatly reduced, highest noted delay is 100ms down from 500ms above.
Monitoring users and groups of users is now easy
Through NetScope's Active Directory Support Internet access can be restricted to individuals and groups. Restrict access to social media for normal users, but allow marketing full access. You can even restrict access to certain web domains by time of day, let users access YouTube at lunch time and after work hours.
Click on any segment to drill down and see group users
In this chart we have drilled down on the Marketing group. Here we are seeing all the users in the marketing group and their percentage usage as a total of the group. With NetScope you can further drill down and see what applications and websites each user is currently using over the Internet.
Block unauthorized applications from accessing the Internet
Detecting some applications can be difficult with IP and Domain name filtering only. The TOR browser (used for the Dark / Deep Web) hides itself in the SSL application layer. NetScope can, however, detect it with Deep Packet Inspection when it makes it's initial connection to the encrypted network. This enables an administrator to detect which users are currently trying to access the Dark Web.
Use NetScope to alert on or block unwanted traffic
Once you have detected the unwanted application type you can use NetScope to block the traffic. It is also reasonable to allow unwanted application types but use the alerts to notify the network administrators of their use. That way the users can be contacted and notified that this practice is not acceptable.