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Hello and welcome to another episode of Webinformant dot tv. I am David Strom, your host and reviewer.
Today we look at how to get more insight into the applications running on your network and
how to control those applications to improve your network operations with the Blue Coat
Systems PacketShaper.
We are looking at the PacketShaper's dashboard that is showing us real-time results of the
top ten inbound and outbound applications and how much of our simulated 1.5 megabit
T-1 Internet connection they consume . Let's look at four typical questions that an IT
manager might have about their network:
First, I may be worried that my users are wasting time on Facebook and MySpace, but
are they impacting my network bandwidth and interfering with business-critical applications
by accessing these social networking sites? To answer this, we go to the traffic management
screen and look at these apps. Here you see the historical graphs for Facebook and while
there is some traffic generated, it isn't much more than a few kilobits of bandwidth.
Nevertheless, we can change the priority of this traffic, in effect slow down our users'
connection to these specific Web sites. We click on the policy manager icon on the left
and click on the control traffic tab and select the priority type and then change its priority
from number 3 – normal to number 1 – low. There are also other ways to rate limit
traffic to a portion of your total bandwidth with the PacketShaper product. This could
ensure that if users access audio and video content on these sites, they won't interfere
as much with other more business-oriented network applications. You also can completely
block this application, should that be appropriate for your situation.
. Let's move on to another question: Do I have enough bandwidth to handle video-oriented
applications like YouTube and WebEx? Video can be a very intensive use of bandwidth and
it also suffers in quality if it does not have the right network conditions. If we go
back to the dashboard we see that WebEx is among our top ten apps on the pie charts.
If we go into the traffic management tab and select this application, you can see that
at peak times of the day we are consuming our entire T1 with Webex video conferences.
Again, we can give this traffic higher priority, assuming that it is for real business purposes,
using a similar process to what we just showed.
Here is another issue. What is the impact of real-time streaming apps like Pandora on
my network? Pandora allows you to set up a customized Internet radio station that users
can listen to on their desktops. The trouble is, they often mute them or walk away from
their PCs and don't turn off these streams. Again, we search for this app and display
the historical report for average and peak utilization, and you can see that frequently
Pandora has various peaks as it grabs new songs to stream.
One final question: How do I know that my business critical applications are working
properly and have acceptable response times in all of my branch offices? We are looking
at this report that is showing this response time information for a variety of applications,
with green meaning they are performing within acceptable parameters. Here we see SAP and
email, among others are showing some critical warnings
As you can see, there is a lot of insight into how your applications are being used
with the Blue Coat PacketShaper. There are plenty of products that can report on network
traffic, such as Sniffers but they are more focused on lower-level netowrk reporting and
analysis of particular protocols rather than providing visibility and control of applications.
There are also firewalls and intrusion prevention products that can block apps, but not as easily
control them. And there are Web filtering products that can block particular categories
of applications going across these ports, but again not offer much in the way of granular
control.
Thanks for watching Web Informant dot tv, feel free to send me your comments via email
to david at strom dot com.