The Critical Demands of Traffic Visibility
The Challenges of Network-wide Traffic Visibility and Analysis
The Unique Traffic Analysis Features of GenieNRM's Solutions

• The Critical Demands of Traffic Visibility
  Be it in an enterprise network environment or in a carrier-grade service network, traffic visibility is more than a nice-to-have feature on the network managers’ lists. Why? To increase and maintain the availability and performance of their networks, network managers face a multitude of challenges: how to minimize costs incurred from a network down disaster, how to utilize bandwidth as efficiently as possible, how to achieve better peering relationships, how to provide value added services to target customers and how to increase the ARPU (Average Revenue Per User). With today’s networks ever growing in complexity and scalability, network managers find these challenges increasingly hard to address.
  Traffic Visibility is the key to these challenges, yet it never means just collect as much as information as possible and produce reports with no clear goal in mind. It implies further traffic pattern insights, for example, where are the bottlenecks and hence need to start thinking about upgrading the links? What is the long term growing trend so that anything strange going on can be spotted? Where are the traffic flows coming from and going to, in terms of network regions and routing paths? Who are the heavy users and what are the popular applications for better business analysis and marketing? Such in-depth traffic visibility can help network managers give their users better performance, save the company money, increase the profit of a service provider, and reduce the firefighting when a trouble happened.

• The Challenges of Network-wide Traffic Visibility and Analysis
  There have been various mechanisms for providing traffic visibility and analysis reports. Some tools use SNMP to gather utilization stats by polling device interface and CPUs at regular intervals. RMON probes can provide more information such as top talkers or protocols in use. Some free tools can also be found to offer flow-based traffic stats. However, these data retrieved and information provided is limited because it looks at the network in discrete pieces, presenting separate views of each link’s data. It helps in understanding issues closely related to a particular link, but sheds no light on traffic dynamics across multiple links.
  Network-wide traffic analysis is not an easy job for two reasons. Firstly, the data collection for link-based traffic collection can be a big challenge as a network scale grows. It is expensive and impractical to deploy traffic ‘sensors’ (i.e. sniffers, probes, etc.) everywhere around the network to collect traffic information network-wide. However, “flow-based” solutions can address this problem reasonably. “Flow-based” solutions collect traffic information from existing network devices (e.g. routers, switches) in the network infrastructure. No huge number of extra traffic sensors is needed, which provides better Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) by reducing the deployment cost and the maintenance cost.
  Secondly, the traffic data are usually collected on a per-link, per-interface basis. Large networks may have hundreds, or thousands of links. Simply collecting traffic stats from every link not only costs massive processing power and storage, but also implies data “double counting” problems. The mountain of data volume need further network operation know-how to filter and aggregate the data. Therefore, to provide precise and applicable information to users, sophisticated traffic models shall be designed and embedded in the traffic analysis solution.

• The Unique Traffic Analysis Features of GenieNRM's Solutions
  GenieATM is an advanced network traffic analysis and mining system which provides network-wide traffic visibility for both service provider and enterprise networks. GenieATM collects network traffic data from various data sources (NetFlow, SNMP, BGP, etc.), process the data with the built-in Network Modeled Traffic Analysis engine. It provides network managers with abundant analysis reports, real-time troubleshooting tool, historical incident forensics and role-based authorization for enabling MSP models.
  Some unique market-leading functions offered by GenieATM include:
  • Traffic Matrix Reports for Cross Analysis
  • Traffic Attribute and Composition Analysis
  • Real-time and Historical Top-N Analysis
  • Peering Analysis by combining routing information and traffic accountin