Traffic Insights Alerts and Dashboards
Configuring Traffic Insights Alerts
You can configure alerts for Traffic Insights using the same alert components as for other ThousandEyes features.
To view which alert metrics are specific to Traffic Insights, see Traffic Insights Alerts.
Configuring Traffic Insights Dashboards
To get started quickly with a dashboard for Traffic Insights, start with the Traffic Insights Flows dashboard template. See Using the Dashboard Templates for information on where and how to deploy templates.
If you want to add Traffic Insights widgets to an existing dashboard, see Dashboard Widgets, which lists which widgets are available for Traffic Insights in its Widget Configuration Summary Table.
The Traffic Insights Flows dashboard template can be customized to suit your specific requirements, whether before or after deployment, but comes with the following default widgets.
Netflow (Mean) - a number card widget. Provides a quick view of the overall health and delta for the following metrics:
Total Throughput
Downstream Throughput
Upstream Throughput
Connection Rate
Total Throughput (by Device) - a timeline widget.
Downstream Throughput, Upstream Throughput, and Connection Rate (by Device) - timeline widgets. Note that connection rate only populates for TCP flows. See Applying Filters for configuration options.
NetFlow App (Top 25) - a multi-metric table. See Configure Your NetFlow App (Top 25) Widget for configuration requirements.
Downstream Throughput, Upstream Throughput and Connection Rate by application - timeline widgets. Applying Filters can help to make the best sense of these charts.
Total Throughput (by Location) - a timeline widget.
Total Location Throughput (by Device) and Total Device Throughput (by Interface) - both color grid widgets.
For all of the above widgets, you can customize them to your preferences using the cog icon in the top right of each widget to open their edit panes.
Configure Your NetFlow App (Top 25) Widget
This widget defaults to sorting by application (alphabetical). For best results, and to view your “top talkers” (applications with the highest throughput), sort instead by total throughput, also with the following adjustments:
Click the cog icon on the top right of the widget to open the editing panel.
Editing Multi Metric Table panel Update the Widget Title to “NetFlow App (Top 25)”.
Click Rows to access the Design panel.
Use the Sort By dropdown to select Total Throughput (Mean).
The widget Design panel The down arrow is the default selection to mean “descending”. If you wanted to find the least used applications, you could click the up arrow (“ascending”).
Additional adjustments could include:
In this example, the Rows field is set to Application for the purposes of “top talkers”, but you could also choose from All, Geo Location, Device or Interface.
Show Comparison to Previous Timespan shows the data change delta below the metric between the current data set and the previous data set.
Limit To x rows allows you to adjust how many rows you view.
Click Save.
Applying Filters
While you can apply filters to individual widgets via the cog icon, you can also apply filters to your whole dashboard, which you can then save for future reference. See Tailoring Dashboards with Dashboard Filters for instructions on how to select, save, and load saved filters to your dashboard. You can also save a filter as a default, and lock widget filters. For the Traffic Insights Flows template, the following dashboard filters are available (noting that Geo Location is already added by default):
Application
Device
Interface
The filters offer the following use case examples:
Geo Location: Filters all NetFlow data from specific locations; for example you have NetFlow set up at a remote location like Homer, Alaska, where you have users experiencing an issue accessing your corporate application to book their deep-sea fishing trip. Once you select the locations, the entire dashboards' widgets are filtered to only show data from those locations.
Application: Lists all the applications that have been identified using NBAR (see Initiating and Understanding Application Recognition for more information). Choose any number of applications to filter by. This can be especially useful for quickly troubleshooting network performance that you know is being caused by a specific application, or to narrow down applications that may be causing network performance issues.
Device: Filters by device name. For example, quickly isolate the flows shown in the dashboard to just the device or set of devices that you want to troubleshoot flow data for. Or if you had a particular set of devices in your data center that serve your critical applications for your warehouse, you could save a filter with them and use it for troubleshooting or share it with your support team as their warehouse application dashboard.
Interface: Filters by interface. For example, use this in conjunction with the device filter to isolate flow data for just a device and interface to understand the blast radius of a user infected with malware.
You can also move straight from the dashboard to Traffic Insights > Views, with all the relevant filters applied, to troubleshoot any issue you see on the dashboard. See Troubleshooting with Dashboard Drill Down to find out how.
Configure the Refresh Rate
The dashboard is set to refresh every 24 hours by default, yet you probably run tests far more frequently than that and need to view your enterprise traffic status more than once a day. To update your dashboard refresh frequency, we recommend selecting Last 1 hour from the top right frequency dropdown.
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