Overview
In addition to reporting the traffic flows and WAN performance associated with the SteelHead appliances, NetProfiler appliances provide unified monitoring and reporting of the effectiveness of SteelHead Quality of Service shaping policies deployed on SteelHead appliances across the network. This requires collecting two types of information from the SteelHead devices.
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Traffic attributes - SteelHead QoS classification ID, Application ID and DSCP marking. The SteelHead appliances must be configured to include this information in the SteelFlow Net or NetFlow v9 data that they are sending to NetProfiler (via a Flow Gateway appliance) .
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Configuration information - SteelHead QoS shaping policy configuration settings. The SteelHead appliances must be configured to allow the NetProfiler to query their REST API to retrieve QoS configuration information.
The NetProfiler uses REST API queries to poll the SteelHead appliances for QoS configuration information once every 24 hours to stay synchronized with the actual SteelHead settings. Newly-added SteelHead appliances are polled as soon as NetProfiler discovers them. You can also initiate polling manually.
The NetProfiler uses the SteelHead QoS configuration data to interpret the class and application IDs in the flow data it receives from the SteelHead appliances via SteelFlow Net or NetFlow v9. This enables it to report the traffic shaping performance of each SteelHead. Additionally, the NetProfiler can aggregate all traffic data by QoS class name and report the overall performance of classes across the network.