Introduction

The Cisco NetFlow Generation Appliance (NGA) 3140 redefines network visibility and establishes a new standard for high-performance, cost-effective solutions for flow visibility. It empowers network operations, engineering, and security teams with actionable insight into network traffic for the purpose of resource optimization, application performance improvement, traffic accounting, and security needs.

Primary benefits include:

  • Accelerated problem resolution with visibility across multiple observation points
  • Accurate network usage characterization for billing or chargeback
  • Right-sized physical and virtual network resources
  • Fortified network protection with full end-to-end flow visibility
  • Improved switch performance by offloading the NetFlow generation function
Simplifying operational manageability, the appliances can be deployed at key observation places such as the server access layer, fabric path domains, and Internet exchange points. The power of visibility is dramatically amplified when NGA is connected to multiple network devices to analyze flows hop by hop, essential for security, capacity planning, and troubleshooting.

Benefits

  • Increased network ROI
  • Enhanced operational efficiency
  • Reinforced network security

Cisco NGA exports standard NetFlow (v5, v9, IPFIX). Any NetFlow collector supporting these formats can be used for visualizing NetFlow data exported by Cisco NGA. These applications may include network security monitoring, cloud services monitoring, capacity planning, and performance troubleshooting, and so on.

Cisco NGA offers the deployment flexibility to enable a broad range of use cases to ease manageability in the data center. Common use cases include:

  • Profiling of server access network traffic
  • Characterization of traffic across Cisco FabricPath domains
  • Visibility into hosted application traffic, such as Oracle, FTP, Microsoft Exchange, Citrix Remote Desktop, and Common Internet File Service (CIFS) traffic
  • Application performance troubleshooting
  • Capacity planning
  • Quality-of-service (QoS) monitoring and validation
  • Cyber threat detection through traffic behavior visibility
  • Traffic utilization of IP storage, such as Small Computer System Interface over IP (iSCSI, Network File System (NFS), Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE), and Serial Attached SCSI (SAS)
  • Interactions across virtual machines in a virtual server environment
  • Characterization of peering traffic across Internet exchange points (IXPs)
  • Monitoring of Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) traffic