Network-Based Application Recognition (NBAR) is a feature in Cisco devices (including routers, firewalls, wireless controllers, etc.) that provides intelligent network traffic classification. It is a classification engine that can recognize a wide variety of applications, including web-based applications and client/server applications that dynamically assign TCP/UDP port numbers.

With Kentik’s Universal Data Records (UDR) architecture, we quickly developed new dimensions that are associated with NBAR including: Application name, Application category, Application subcategory, Application group, Application traffic class, and Application business relevance. These Dimensions are available for NBAR-enabled devices:

That means if the flow source is from a Cisco NBAR-enabled product such as ISR or ASR routers, ASA firewall or wireless LAN controller, Kentik can ingest the NBAR-related fields from the flow record and show those as NBAR dimensions in the Kentik UI. Also, Kentik’s existing Application dimension will inherit the value from the Application Name field in the NBAR data.

This support allows Kentik customers to understand traffic consumption and distribution among the applications that are running.

Furthermore, Kentik’s alerting engine also fully supports these new NBAR dimensions. You can define an Alert Policy based on metrics for any NBAR dimension.

For more information, please see the About Applications topic in our Knowledge Base, or contact our Customer Success team.