How to Understand Application Visibility with Blue Coat PacketShaper Video

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How to Understand Application Visibility with Blue Coat PacketShaper

How to Understand Application Visibility with Blue Coat PacketShaper Hello and welcome to another episode of WebInformant.TV. I’m David Strom, your host and reviewer. Today, we will look at how to get more insight into the applications running on your network and how to control these applications to improve your network operations with the Blue Coat systems PacketShaper. We’re looking at the PacketShaper dashboard that is showing us real time results of the top 10 inbound and outbound applications and how much of our simulated 1.5 megabit T1 internet connection they consumed. Let’s look at four typical questions that an IT manager might have about their network. First, I maybe worried that my users are wasting time on Facebook and MySpace but if they impacting my network bandwidth and interfering with business critical applications by accessing the social networking sites. To answer this we go to traffic management screen and look up 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 user’s connection to the specific websites. We click on the Policy Manager icon on the left and click on Control Traffic tab, select the Priority Type and then changes Priority from number three which is normal to number one which is low. There are other ways to rate limit traffic to a portion of your total bandwidth with the package say for product. This could ensure the diffusers access audio and video content on the sites. They won’t interfere as much with other more business oriented network applications. You can also 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 very intense of use to bandwidth and it also suffers in quality for it does not have the right network conditions. If we go back to the dashboard we see that WebEx is among our top 10 apps on the pie charts. If we go on to the Traffic Management tab and select this application you can see that at a peak time of the day we are consuming our entire T1 with WebEx video conferences. Again, we can give this traffic higher priority assuming that it’s a real business purposes using a similar process to what we just showed. Here’s another issue, what’s the impact of real time streaming apps like Pandora on my network. Pandora allows you to set up a customize internet radio station that users can listen to on their desktops. The trouble is they often mute them or walked away from their PCs and don’t turn off the 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 the 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’re looking at this report that is showing the response time information for variety applications with green meaning and performing with an acceptable parameters. Here we see SAP and email among others are showing critical warnings. As you can see there are a lot of insights to how your applications are being used with the Blue Coat PacketShaper. There are plenty of products that we can report on network traffic such as Snuffers but they are more focus on lower level network reporting analyses or particular protocols rather than providing visibility and controlled applications. There are also Firewalls and intrusion prevention products that can block apps but none as easily control them and there are web filtering products that can block particular categories of applications going across these ports, but again not at all for much in the way of granular control. Thanks for watching WebInformant.TV. Feel free to send me your comments via email to David@Strom.com.

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How to Understand Application Visibility with Blue Coat PacketShaper

Hello and welcome to another episode of WebInformant.TV. I’m David Strom, your host and reviewer.

Today, we will look at how to get more insight into the applications running on your network and how to control these applications to improve your network operations with the Blue Coat systems PacketShaper.

We’re looking at the PacketShaper dashboard that is showing us real time results of the top 10 inbound and outbound applications and how much of our simulated 1.5 megabit T1 internet connection they consumed. Let’s look at four typical questions that an IT manager might have about their network.

First, I maybe worried that my users are wasting time on Facebook and MySpace but if they impacting my network bandwidth and interfering with business critical applications by accessing the social networking sites. To answer this we go to traffic management screen and look up 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 user’s connection to the specific websites. We click on the Policy Manager icon on the left and click on Control Traffic tab, select the Priority Type and then changes Priority from number three which is normal to number one which is low.

There are other ways to rate limit traffic to a portion of your total bandwidth with the package say for product. This could ensure the diffusers access audio and video content on the sites. They won’t interfere as much with other more business oriented network applications. You can also 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 very intense of use to bandwidth and it also suffers in quality for it does not have the right network conditions. If we go back to the dashboard we see that WebEx is among our top 10 apps on the pie charts. If we go on to the Traffic Management tab and select this application you can see that at a peak time of the day we are consuming our entire T1 with WebEx video conferences. Again, we can give this traffic higher priority assuming that it’s a real business purposes using a similar process to what we just showed.

Here’s another issue, what’s the impact of real time streaming apps like Pandora on my network. Pandora allows you to set up a customize internet radio station that users can listen to on their desktops. The trouble is they often mute them or walked away from their PCs and don’t turn off the 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 the 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’re looking at this report that is showing the response time information for variety applications with green meaning and performing with an acceptable parameters.

Here we see SAP and email among others are showing critical warnings. As you can see there are a lot of insights to how your applications are being used with the Blue Coat PacketShaper. There are plenty of products that we can report on network traffic such as Snuffers but they are more focus on lower level network reporting analyses or particular protocols rather than providing visibility and controlled applications.

There are also Firewalls and intrusion prevention products that can block apps but none as easily control them and there are web filtering products that can block particular categories of applications going across these ports, but again not at all for much in the way of granular control.

Thanks for watching WebInformant.TV. Feel free to send me your comments via email to David@Strom.com.

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