Scalable flow monitoring for public service

Warwickshire County Council provides a wide range of services to the county citizens. A well-managed computer network with detailed overview of its data flow is essential to the council’s operation and effectivity.

Warwickshire County Council has been looking for a replacement of their current flow monitoring solution with deficient capabilities, especially lack of retention of flow data. More specifically, WCC wanted:

• Flow collection from both core routers and external routers, supporting various flow standards (NetFlow, IPFIX). Also, the new solution was required to be able to combine statistics and reports of multiple flow standards.
• Long-term flow data retention. The previous solution aggregated flow data into top statistics after a couple of days, however, the customer needed two months of flow data history without aggregation.
• Use of existing hardware, ideally without the need to purchase and install any new physical devices.
• Testing deployment in the customer’s infrastructure to precisely validate expected benefits.
• Professional support pre-sale and post-sale.

As mentioned, one of the main concerns for Warwickshire County Council was that the new solution ran on existing hardware to avoid extra costs. Flowmon's virtualized solution was ideal to satisfy this request: Flowmon server was installed on a virtual platform, and Flowmon Collector was installed out of path to the core devices collecting netflows. WCC found this setup very flexible and easy to maintain.

Once deployed, Flowmon instantly proved useful in terms of network visibility and effective troubleshooting. Previously, WCC would find themselves facing issues such as temporary connectivity outages at edge sites, without clues as to what was causing the issue. Flowmon provided advanced features including rich filtering and user-defined profiling, enabling WCC to check the volume and type of traffic at any given moment to obtain information with exactly the right amount of detail, in the right context.

For example, analysis of the occasional connectivity failures showed that the WAN link was mostly overloaded with running updates or backups, not taken down by an actual network issue. Specific information such as this helps WCC take appropriate steps and provide timely explanation to customers, not to mention the considerable amounts of time and effort saved by not having to investigate the issue and trying to fix it in real time.