Universities

An Internet management toolkit for Universities



Monitor key university services like elearning

Elearning is a key technology for universities today. Access for on-site and remote students is a service that needs to run as smoothly as possible. It is crucial therefore to detect any problems with these services such as delays and bandwidth saturation.

In this example we can see that elearning has large delays (round trip times or RTT). Anything higher than 200ms may result in complaints from students.

Protecting elearning with Quality of Service (QoS)

Implementing QoS (packet shaping) rules is a quick way to reduce the latency that students are experiencing. In the example below we have implemented traffic shaping on elearning 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.

Controlling access and monitoring users with Active Directory support

Through NetScope's Active Directory Support Internet access can be restricted to individuals and groups. For example you can keep academic Internet use unrestricted while limiting on-site undergraduate access. Within NetScope you may click on any segment and drill-down to see the top users and their activity.

Block Unauthorized Internet Activity - Apps and Users

Detecting some applications can be difficult with IP and Domain name filtering only. Deep packet inspection allows detection of applications like The Onion Router (The Dark Web / Deep Web) and BitTorrent. Universities are particularly susceptible to the misuse of their Internet by unauthorized apps due to the large base of users.

Top application activity showing BitTorrent - (Click for more information)




Block or alert on unwanted applications

Once an unwanted application type is detected with NetScope's deep packet inspection you can choose what you'd like to do with that traffic. Two sensible options are to block the traffic entirely, or set up alerts that will email the network administrator every time that traffic type appears. With the second option it enables the network administrator to alert the user that this is unacceptable behavior.