How Application-Level Data Enrichment Transforms Traffic Monitoring

With today’s complex network environments, relying solely on protocol and port information to monitor traffic can leave critical insights undiscovered. If you’re like most network administrators, you likely started your monitoring journey with SNMP polling. This approach gave you visibility into interface utilization but not which traffic was causing it.

You may have then added a network flow monitoring solution, gaining insights like the source of high-utilization traffic, its destination, and the protocol used. While these capabilities are valuable additions, they still don’t provide all the necessary details to make informed decisions about your network.

Achieving the visibility needed for modern networks requires a new strategy that uses flow data enriched with detailed application information.

Screenshot: Network Observability solution without application data enrichment:

Find Out Exactly How Your Network Is Used

Traditional monitoring methods can identify which protocols consume the most bandwidth but lack clarity on the specific applications responsible for that usage. For instance, while they may show that a significant amount of bandwidth is taken up by HTTP traffic, they won’t indicate whether it’s consumed by a critical business application like Salesforce or a nonessential service like streaming video. This makes it challenging to prioritize network resources effectively.

By integrating application-level data, administrators can pinpoint exact bandwidth usage for each application, even down to the cloud region where a service is hosted. This enhanced visibility lets you determine whether bandwidth is being used for a video call, Netflix streaming, or something else entirely—and identify any connectivity or latency issues in specific cloud regions.

This capability is also valuable for optimizing network performance, allowing administrators to quickly identify and resolve bottlenecks, such as traffic issues between users and specific cloud regions or inefficient bandwidth usage by non-business-critical applications.

Assessing Comprehensive Visibility Across All Network Flows

Many network devices, such as those equipped with Cisco’s NBAR2 technology, can identify applications within traffic flows. However, not all devices possess this capability, and the ones that do come with a much higher price tag.

Enriching all flow data with application information from a global application database ensures consistent and comprehensive insights across the entire network, regardless of the underlying hardware.

This uniform visibility is important for optimizing performance, ensuring compliance, and maintaining security. For example, by enriching flow data with application information, administrators can quickly detect suspicious behavior, such as unauthorized applications consuming bandwidth or accessing sensitive data.

Uniform visibility can also save you thousands of dollars in hardware purchasing costs and expand the range of devices that fulfill your observability needs.

Screenshot: Same data as above, with ElastiFlow NetIntel enabled

ElastiFlow NetIntel: Universal Application Data Enrichment

ElastiFlow’s NetIntel solution addresses network team visibility challenges by providing application data enrichment for all observed network flows, irrespective of device type or manufacturer. NetIntel merges network and threat intelligence into a single data source that can enrich any flow data from any vendor. The solution can:

• Transform raw traffic data into actionable intelligence with application-level insights

• Support data-driven decisions through contextual threat insights  

• Provide application-based network usage visibility for enhanced security and performance optimization

Incorporating application-level insights into network flow data converts your raw traffic information into actionable intelligence, empowering organizations to optimize performance, enhance security, and make data-driven decisions.

Are you curious how application-level data enrichment can improve your network observability? Contact us for more information.