What is a Traffic Pattern? It is a logical structure you create in order to analyze the network traffic you are interested in. Traffic Patterns are completely independent of the physical infrastructure. This enables you to focus on logical properties of your traffic instead focusing on physical links, network devices and their interfaces.
Traffic Pattern is a part of the totally collected network traffic. It represents the traffic between two networks, namely:
The traffic between the Internal Network and External Network is always bidirectional. This means that the Traffic Pattern will match the traffic going from the Internal Network to External Network, and from the External Network to Internal Network. The statistics are generated for the traffic between Internal and External Networks separately in two opposite directions, referenced from the Internal Network perspective:
There are three types of Traffic depending on the direction of traffic in regards to you Internal network:
Traffic Pattern's Internal and External networks are defined by IP address ranges and other parameters collected by the NetFlow and similar protocols can be used as filters to further specify Traffic Patterns. Learn more about Traffic Pattern Settings. |
Exporter Traffic | Traffic Pattern | |
---|---|---|
Setup | provided by default | requires custom setup |
Based on | physical infrastructure | logical definition |
Nodes | exporters and interfaces | traffic patterns, subnet sets and subnets |
Monitors | traffic on routers, L3 switches and interfaces | specific (custom defined) traffic |
Analysis focus | whole traffic on specific physical infrastructure | specific traffic between two network ranges |
Level of expertise | fast setup and easy to understand | complex setup and harder to understand |
In general you will use: