UC and Collaboration Performance Management – Part 3: NetFlow
August 31, 2021
Jamie Litherland, Solutions Owner, VOSS Solutions
So far in our Performance Management series of blog posts, we have taken a look at VOSS Assurance and VOSS Analytics. This week, we shine the spotlight on NetFlow.
NetFlow gives a deep network understanding across performance, usage and degradation areas. By combining it with collaboration data across on-premises and cloud deployments, you will improve fault isolation, user experience, and network planning, while identifying security vulnerabilities. With NetFlow you will have visibility across all network traffic and deep root cause analysis with proactive synthetic call testing.
So, how to establish if you need NetFlow? We find it extremely useful if you face the following challenges:
- Do you have voice quality issues but you aren’t clear where this problem is?
- Do you have a disconnect from the voice and the network elements?
- Does nobody know the flows and traffic patterns across the network?
- Are the networks connected to different domains such a cloud, making fault isolation difficult?
- Are you concerned about security and what is sending / receiving data?
If you have answered “yes” to any of these questions, NetFlow could be a great fit for your organization.
Let’s take a look at how it works.
NetFlow takes streaming telemetry data from the core network devices and conducts packet analysis to give meaningful insight to the source IP, destination IP, port and protocols. With the power of VOSS Assurance’s call quality information, it will identify network congestion and capacity limitations.
NetFlow helps you to understand the UC data flows during investigations, and will proactively spot issues with raptor running synthetic tests. Taking home-working, VPNs, cloud and complex on-premises network solutions into account, VOSS helps you understand your voice and your IP solutions, and enables you to speed up fault diagnostic and isolation.
With VOSS, you can see traffic flows and types across all cloud, hosted, and enterprise services. By combining your insight into voice quality and experience with network performance, you can easily identify areas of degradation. VOSS empowers you to understand the cause of voice jitter, delay, and hops, in the context of a network. It also combines with raptor for passive call flow testing.
With NetFlow, you can expect the following key features:
- Collect, correlate, and customize your dashboarding and reporting
- Access additional data sources for forensic network evaluation
- Understand traffic flows in the network, and quickly identify and rectify any changes
- Understand congestion that impacts a user’s service, experience, or quality
- Security to ensure the authorized flows do not open insecure paths
- Access your traffic history to analyze if changes have altered the user experience
- Identify bottlenecks in the network, especially internet routers, core routers and VPN concentrators
- Combine flows with port, bandwidth, and alarm information
- Overlay call quality data with traffic flows, using synthetic tests
- See voice jitter, delays, and hops in the context of a network
As for business outcomes, you can expect to experience benefits in three core areas with NetFlow:
- Increase your visibility – Blend your view of cloud, hosted and enterprise services to see traffic flows across these varied domains from a single point of control.
- Improve your knowledge – Combine your insight into voice quality and experience with network performance data and raptor data, to get a deeper understanding of your platform’s performance.
- Take dynamic action – Harness the actionable intelligence provided by VOSS to continually improve and optimize your collaboration platform, and create automated rules to pre-empt and then self-heal issues that arise.
Next week, I’ll bring you my final installment of our Performance Management blog series. This will focus on the fourth pillar of the VOSS Assurance Suite: Cloud.
In the meantime, here is some further reading around NetFlow.
If you have any questions, please get in touch.
