With the advent of BYOD and the proliferation of mobile applications – it’s become ever important to have visibility into your wireless network using deep packet inspection. By classifying the data flows that go through the wireless LAN, administrators now have visibility into the top users and top applications which are consuming bandwidth on their network. After analyzing this data and armed with visibility into these applications, Cisco AVC allows the administrator to then take action such as prioritize, deprioritize or block on the applications in their network.
Since Cisco has released Application Visibility and Control (AVC) for wireless – our customers and partners have been highly interested in the technology and how it can be put to work for them. Visibility into the applications is made possible on the controller web interface which is useful for diagnosing real-time issues or analyzing short-term application trends. The wireless LAN controller GUI is shown below depicting a network using a variety of applications as identified by AVC.
For larger deployments and for historical tracking the controller can also export the application flow statistics via NetFlow v9. To consume these statistics, Cisco Prime acts as a Netflow collector thus analyzing, correlating and logging the results in the same user interface where network administration takes place.
In addition to Cisco’s own Netflow collector functionality, a variety of our partners have stepped up to provide 3rd party collection and analysis of AVC statistics. One such example tool is Plixer’s Scrutinizer which has recently announced the availability of wireless specific reports based on Cisco’s Wireless Controller Netflow export data. The canned reports within Scrutinizer focus on wireless downstream traffic, wireless upstream traffic, traffic per SSID and additional reports with a focus on the client.
To provide a glimpse into these historical reports, the above screenshot showcases Scrutinizer representing the downstream traffic flows from a Cisco wireless controller. For more information, Cisco and Plixer will be doing a joint webcast to announce the availability of Wireless Controller reports within the Scrutinizer application.
Webcasts are being offered on:
For more on Cisco AVC, visit http://www.cisco.com/go/wirelessavc
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Great stuff!