Application Report

The applications report shows the top applications by volume and their average throughput. Any single application can also be graphed by clicking the filter icon for your desired application in the data table below. Application traffic inbound into your LAN is reported separately from the outbound traffic. You can choose show the entire application traffic by adding in a category to represent the remaining application traffic on your network and so the cumulative stack on the throughput chart represents all the application traffic through the appliance. This will help you understand the significance of the top applications relative to the whole. In additional to showing a stacked cumulative view, you can choose to display the throughput as a line chart with a common zero baseline. You can also choose to show the application volumes as a pie chart. These charts can answer questions such as, “What are the top applications on my network? Are those top applications significant relative to the entire traffic? How much bandwidth does my FTP application typically take? Could one application be choking out the other application traffic? Do any of my top applications appear to be limited?” Using this information you can determine if you need to create policies for these high data volume applications or for the high data volume applications that tend to have large spikes. You may want to create protection policies for your business critical apps and you may want to create limiting policies for high volume non-business critical applications such as recreational applications.

Note: The average bandwidth is calculated as the total bits observed in the charting interval and dividing by the number of seconds in that interval. E.g. For a chart with an hour of data, the intervals are five minutes.

Various components on the screen can be toggled on and off by clicking buttons above the charts.

• Inbound button - Toggles on or off all reporting for inbound traffic including all the charts and the data tables below the charts.
• Outbound button - Toggles on or off all reporting for outbound traffic including all the charts and the data table below the charts.
• Time chart button - Toggles on or off the time series charts and allows selecting stacked area display versus a line chart display.
• Pie button - Toggles on or off the data volume pie charts.
• Remaining Traffic button - Toggles on or off the presence of a category for all the remaining applications summed together.
• Data details - Toggles on or off the tables of data below the charts.

Note that when generating a pdf report of this screen, the toggle states are taken into account. That is, if you had toggled off the outbound charts, they will not be present in the pdf.

If you drilled into the applications chart from the virtual circuit chart or the subnets chart, then the relevant virtual circuit or subnet will be shown on the filter bar below the button bar. To turn off the filtering, click on the close 'x' in the filter tag.

	Version Info: Filtering to show any single application is available in 7.0.1 and above.

Where do I find this report?

Go to Monitor > Applications > Applications.

To turn on or off the remaining traffic category

Toggle the Remaining Traffic button on the button bar. When toggled on, a grey chart series will appear in all charts (throughput, pie, top applications) representing all the applications on your network that are not explicitly represented in the top applications. If the remaining applications show vastly more data volume than the top applications, then the top applications may look insignificant relative to the total, and so you may need to toggle off the remaining traffic category to see the relative differences and usage patterns of the top applications.

To change the throughput chart to stacked area charts or line charts

Press the down arrow next to the stacked chart icon to switch to the line chart. Conversely, press the down arrow next to the line chart icon to switch to the stacked area chart. The line chart shows the applications against the common zero baseline so that the applications can be compared with one another and the pattern of a specific application is clearer. You can look for particular patterns such as spikes or flat tops.

To determine if one or more applications may be choking out the other application traffic

View the throughput charts with the remaining traffic category toggled on. For any periods where the cumulative throughput is especially high (compared to the pipe size that this appliance is managing) is there an application or two that is consuming a significant portion of the bandwidth. If so, that application may be choking out other application and would be a candidate for control. Note: You many need to go to the virtual circuit chart and filter the applications by the individual virtual circuits to understand whether an application is choking out others since the virtual circuits share bandwidth and an application my overrun one virtual circuit but not others.

To determine if any of the top applications appear to be limited

View the throughput charts as a line chart with the remaining traffic category toggled off. If any of the lines representing the applications have raised flat tops, this may represent that the application is being limited by a policy or the capacity of your pipe.

To chart any single application

	Version Info: Available in 7.0.1 and above.

In the data table, each application has a filter icon on the right-hand-side of the row. By clicking on the filter icon, as shown below for Google Encrypted, only the selected application will be charted.

Figure - Click filter icon beside desired application to chart that application.

Figure - Applications are filtered to only show 'Google Encrypted'

While in filter mode, any other application filter icon can be clicked to change which application is charted.

To remove this filter and return to the top application set, click the 'x' on the green 'App: Google Encrypted' filter tag.

To show more applications or fewer applications in the top applications chart and the throughput chart

The number of applications shown are configurable by using the Chart Items setting on the Configuration > System > Setup > Monitoring page. Note: that this configuration applies to all charts on the appliance. See Monitoring Configuration.

How do I interact with the new time-series & bar chart reports?

To understand how to set the desired time range for a chart, see Setting the Time Range.

To understand how to the charts interact and what the toggle buttons do, see Understanding How Charts Relate.

To understand how to drill into the data to find particular filtered data, see Drilling into the Data.

To understand the difference between inbound and outbound traffic, see Understanding Traffic Direction.

To understand how many data points are shown for each time period, see Understanding Traffic Granularity.

To understand how to print the report or schedule the report, see Printing and Scheduling Reports.