How the Exinda is used

The recommended approach for managing your network using an Exinda appliance is through a feedback loop.

1. Start monitoring your traffic by installing your Exinda appliance and viewing the traffic that passes through it.
2. Based on what you learned by monitoring your traffic, configure traffic policy to control undesirable traffic and to protect business critical traffic.
3. Create alerts and application performance monitors to monitor particularly important applications.
4. The Exinda appliance notifies you if certain undesirable thresholds are exceeded or if other notable traffic patterns are identified so that you can take action to tune your network.
5. Configure and tune traffic policy to control and accelerate traffic to ensure business critical traffic is ensured the bandwidth that is needed, and that the traffic is prioritized and accelerated properly.
6. Repeat (from step 4).

Monitoring

A few steps are required to install your Exinda appliance. However, there are no specific steps required to configure monitoring. Right out of the box several traffic attributes will be monitored, such as, L7 applications, application groups, host IP addresses, appliance interfaces, TCP health & efficiency, and appliance health.

If you are looking to monitor particular traffic patterns or usage, objects can be configured to support this.

• Create network objects to isolate particular parts of the network. When using a network object, you can monitor the traffic usage of branches, departments, classes of devices, and so on. A network object can include one or more subnets and one or more IP addresses. See Configure Network Objects to create a network object.
• Configure active directory to identify traffic usage of users on the network. See Configure Active Directory to configure users
• Create an application object if a new or custom application is not identified by the system. See Configure Applications to create an application object.

Alerting & Monitoring Traffic Performance

You can monitor and alert on various aspects of your traffic. You can monitor the user experience of particular applications and alert when the user experience becomes poor. You can monitor the availability of a site by pinging the IP address and define an alert when the latency exceeds your specified threshold or when the packet loss is too great. You can monitor for particular activity that may indicate an issue, such as asymmetric route detection, maximum accelerated connections exceeded, NIC collisions, or dropped packets, and so on.

• To monitor the user experience of particular applications, create an Application Performance Score (APS) object. Setting up an APS is as simple as specifying the application to monitor. The appliance then baselines the traffic to determine what is a reasonable expectation for the application. See Configure Application Performance Score Objects to create an APS object.
• To monitor a particular IP address for availability, create an Service Level Agreement (SLA) object. Setting up an SLA is a matter of specifying the IP address to monitor. See Configure Service Level Agreement Objects to create an SLA object.
• The alerts are sent by email assuming the appliance is configured to send e-mail. Notifications can be set up by specifying the e-mail addresses of those to be notified and identifying the events to report. See Setting Alerts to configure alerts to be sent by email. See Configure an SMTP server for sending email notifications.

Configuring Traffic Policy

Configuring traffic policy requires a bit of setup, however, the simplest solution is to run the Optimizer wizard. By answering a few questions, the system then sets up a traffic policy that effectively controls the general traffic scenarios. See Optimizer Policy Wizard to learn about the policy wizard. Read Optimizer Policy Tree to understand how the policy configuration works.

If you want to put in place particular traffic policies, you can customize the traffic policy to match your requirements.

• Create network objects to isolate particular parts of the network. Using network objects, you can create policies that apply to only specific branches, departments, classes of devices, and so on. A static network object can include one or more subnets and one or more IP addresses. See Configure Network Objects to create a static network object.
• Configure Active Directory to identify users and user groups on the network. By identifying users and user groups, you can create policies that apply to only specific users or user groups. See Configure Active Directory to configure users. To make specific network users or network user groups available to the policy configuration, they must be flagged as being able to be used in the policies. See Configure Network User Objects to create a network object based on a network user. See Configure Network User Group Objects to create a network object based on a network user group.
• Configure VLANs to isolate particular parts of the network that is unrelated to their physical location. Using VLANs, you can create policies that apply to particular functions within the network. See Configure VLAN Objects to configure VLANs.
• Create an application object if a new or custom application is not identified by the system. Configuring your own application objects allow you to create policies that apply to these specific applications. See Configure Applications to create an application object.
• Create schedules to define time periods that more closely match your business. Configuring your own schedules allow you to create policies that change based on time periods that are important to your business. See Configure Schedules to configure schedules.
• Create adaptive response limit rules to automatically restrict a user’s bandwidth once a set transfer limit has been reached within a specified period of time. See Configure Adaptive Response Limit Rules to configure adaptive response rules.