BENOCS Flow Analytics

Multi-dimensional traffic inspection on AS level, edge router level, or even core router level enables deep exploration of your network data-plane for troubleshooting and finding new business opportunities. With our high-performance and easy-to-understand sankey, you can learn about your network’s traffic behavior fast. The best part: you don’t need to be an expert to find value in your network.

AS Level: From source to destination, this is the simplest view of traffic flows through the network. This view is ideal for wholesale and peering departments for spotting peering partners, evaluating transit revenue, and lowering upstream costs.

Edge Router Level: An extension of the AS-level view to include ingress and egress (e.g. BNG and LER routers). With this view, network operations and peering departments gain insights into capacity and utilization for build-outs, upgrades and finding new peering locations.  For networks with multiple locations, this allows easy identification of unnecessary large backbone loads due to wrong handovers in remote regions.

Core Router Level: The core router level enables the CSP to take any link in their backbone and look into what is being transported between two core routers, without either of them having to export any flow traffic.

The BENOCS Looking Glass can be made public and/or paired with BENOCS Flow Analytics. It features AS-path, prefix-path, ping and traceroute without hardware deployed at router locations. By pairing with BENOCS Flow Analytics , we track all routes in your network (iBGP and eBGP). Those routes that shouldn’t be visible in the publicly available Looking Glass can easily be removed.

The private version is accessible via tab in the Webapp and behind a secure login, thus can be unrestricted in data output. This can also be made accessible to your transit- and business-customers with our customer portal module.

The public looking glass assigns public, read-only access to your customers who want to test and trial your network’s routing. Export filters can easily be set.

The Looking Glass holds historical snapshots for debugging and forensics. You can also customize it to fit your company brand and image.

The Core Planner let’s you plan the capacity of your network’s core routers. You can see SNMP-based utilization of all backbone links all on one page, as well as the thermal graphs, which change based on the customizable thresholds. All of this in a click.

The interoperability between Flow Explorer and Core Planner allows you to view the entire path of your traffic from source to destination, filtered for a particular backbone link.

With the Border Planner you can view the capacity and utilization of all the edge routers connected to either your peers, customers, caches or transit providers in a thermal graph controlled by customizable thresholds. You can view the SNMP-based utilization filtered down to a specific neighbor AS or router and split between in and out graphs on a time series.

The interoperability between Flow Explorer and Border Planner allows you to view the entire path of the traffic from source to destination, filtered for a particular router or a neighbor AS.

Transparency is fundamental for any good relationship. With the Customer Portal, you can share the parts of your data with your customers that are relevant to them. By doing so, you give them the same understanding of the network as you have, easing trouble shooting and building trust. This is even more compelling for IPX networks, who need to be as transparent as possible to their customers.

The Customer Portal uses information from BENOCS Flow Analytics to create a customized view that allows the customer to see only the interfaces they are connected to on your network. Operators also have the power to select which dimensions will be displayed for each user.

The customer portal is a valuable feature for hosting-companies, wholesale carriers, IPX, commercial and peering departments. You can also customize it to fit your company brand and image

In the early days of the internet, knowing the amount of traffic going through your network via counter protocols such as SNMP was sufficient for estimating its performance. Nowadays, network traffic has grown in such size and diversity that SNMP alone cannot do traffic mix analytics. Instead, many network operators are finding flow data such as from Netflow to be more pivotal when tracking traffic behavior. However, we have learned that by only trusting a statistical data flow (like Netflow) can lead to false and misleading representations of network traffic. That is why we offer the SNMP feature for data cross-correlation, automatically correcting potential sampling errors from flow sources.

BENOCS Flow Analytics computes sampled flow data as its primary source for visualizing flows and cross-correlates it with SNMP protocols to create an accurate and reliable picture of your traffic flows along with the amount of traffic crossing your network. This also enables complex billing models based on traffic-profile parameters (e.g. destination-profiles)

SNMP information is also used to augment capacity and utilization information.

Being able to see the amount of traffic on your network along with the entire source to destination traffic flows is essential for everyone doing network analysis.

BENOCS’ Core Flow Inspector lets you see traffic for any single backbone link in your network. It displays AS-flows over individual links on your network’s backbone, even if the backbone routers (e.g. LSR’s) don’t export flow information. All traffic dimensions, i.e. source application, source AS , handover AS , nexthop AS , ingress router, egress router and destination AS , are displayed and can be filtered.

Imagine if you could see who is filling your expensive submarine links. Wouldn’t that be awesome?

BENOCS’ Application Identifier correlates flow and DNS data to let you see exactly where your traffic is originating from. It identifies applications and services within the source AS (e.g., Video, Gaming, OS updates, or OTT traffic) based on CNAME/A-record pairing, and offers centrally edited and customizable tags. In the future, Application Identifier will unlock two new dimensions in Flow Explorer to allow users to view the traffic flow for various infrastructure and services.

You may know such information from DPI (Deep Packet Inspection), which faces increasing challenges with scaling and encryption. BENOCS’ Application Identifier is a highly efficient and future-proof alternative.

The Raw Network Analyzer module combines detailed raw flow data with BENOCS’ Core Engine aggregated data to unlock visibility on the IP-Subnet level and harness the real power of BENOCS Analytics. Users can build SQL-based advanced query filters to debug information such as IP Ports, Types of protocols, URL clusters, Type of Service, Sampling direction, v4 vs v6 split, and much more, across all dimensions.

BENOCS Anomaly Alerts, powered by Anodot, learns normal traffic patterns in your network and automatically alerts you to anything out of the ordinary. Physical metrics such as interface in/out traffic, and even logical metrics like “all indirect Akamai traffic terminating in my mobile network” are pushed towards a machine-learning engine to get alerts when the traffic deviates from normal.

Alerts can be fine-tuned on severity levels and other parameters.

Do you want to see how BENOCS Flow Analytics works?