eG Monitoring
 

Measures reported by NBarTest

Applications in today's enterprise networks require different levels of service based upon business requirements. The network can provide a variety of services to help ensure that your mission-critical applications receive the bandwidth they need to deliver the desired performance levels. The difficulty is that today's Internet-based and client-server applications make it difficult for the network to identify and provide the proper level of control you need. NBAR solves this problem by adding intelligent network classification to your infrastructure.

NBAR, an important component of the Cisco Content Networking architecture, is a new classification engine in Cisco IOSŪ Software that can recognize a wide variety of applications, including Web-based applications and client/server applications that dynamically assign TCP or User Datagram Protocol (UDP) port numbers. After the application is recognized, the network can invoke specific services for that particular application. NBAR currently works with quality-of-service (QoS) features to help ensure that the network bandwidth is best used to fulfill your business objectives.

When run on an NBAR-supported Cisco router, this test periodically polls the NBAR MIB to auto-discover the interfaces for which NBAR is enabled, and reports the following for each discovered interface:

  • The network protocols handled by that interface;
  • The traffic generated for every protocol;
  • The bandwidth utilized per protocol.

This way, the test not only reveals busy, bandwidth-intensive interfaces, but also turns the spotlight on specific protocols on those interfaces that are causing excessive bandwidth consumption. Moreover, with the help of these protocol-level usage metrics, administrators can assess how various interfaces and protocols use the network resources, and accordingly fine-tune network policies.

The first step to running this test is to enable NBAR on each interface for which you want to collect NBAR statistics. NBAR can be enabled in two ways:

  • Enabling on the device
  • Enabling from the NetFlow Analyzer user interface

To know how to enable NBAR on each interface, refer to Section 2.2.4 of Monitoring Network Elements document. The measures made by this test are as follows:

Measurement Description Measurement Unit Interpretation
Data_received Indicates the total data received through this interface using this protocol. Mbps  
Data_transmitted Indicates the total traffic - both incoming and outgoing - handled by this interface for this protocol. Mbps  
Total_traffic Indicates the number of tasks that were cancelled during the last measurement period. Mbps  
Percentage_of_traffic Indicates the percentage of total traffic through this interface that pertains to this protocol. Percent Compare the value of this measure across protocols to identify the protocol for which there is heavy traffic through this interface.
Total_bandwidth Indicates the total bandwidth of this interface. Mbps Compare the value of this measure across interfaces to isolate the top consumers of bandwidth usage.
Percentage_of_bandwidth Indicates the percentage of total bandwidth that is utilized by this protocol. Percent By comparing the value of this measure across protocols, you can easily identify which protocol is bandwidth-intensive.
Packets_received Indicates the rate at which packets were received through this interface for this protocol. Pkts/sec  
Packets_sent Indicates the rate at which packets were transmitted through this interface for this protocol. Pkts/sec  
Total_packets Indicates the rate of packet transmission and reception for this protocol. Pkts/sec  
Percentage_of_packets Indicates the percentage of total packet traffic that pertains to this protocol. Percent Compare the value of this measure across protocols to identify which protocol is experiencing high packet traffic.
Inbound_rate Indicates the inbound bit rate as determined by Protocol Discovery. Bits  
Outbound_rate Indicates the outbound bit rate as determined by Protocol Discovery. Bits