Using Your Orion Network Tools to Place and Block Unwanted Use

You know. You've always known. They're back there, in darkened cubicles, playing WoW, downloading Heroes and slowing your network to a crawl. This must be stopped.

Nowadays you obtain the tools to combat this insidious charge on your network. With SolarWinds Orion network tools at your disposal, you actually management the flow of information. And you hold the influence to prevent imbalances in that flow.

Your SolarWinds Orion network tools can help you take anguish of a variety of problems, from isolating an infected computer to blocking unwanted use.

Within your network, you can easily chart the increasing usage of your discrepant uplinks. With the addition of Orion NetFlow Traffic Analyzer, you can chart utilization as you can with a basic Orion NPM installation. This as well enables you to locate particular instances of unwanted use and take prompt corrective action.

Consider the following scenario:

The Problem
1. Your uplink to the Internet has been slowing progressively over the past six months, even though your head count, application use and dedicated bandwidth have all been stable.

2. You expansive the Orion NPM Interlacing Console to see that the link to the net is up at your site. So, you click your specific uplink and consult your Current Percent Utilization of each Interface chart. You can see that the current utilization of your Web-facing interface is 80 percent.

Investigating the Issue
3. You click the Web-facing interface for more information about the problem. Using the Percent Utilization chart and customizing the chart to demonstrate the last six months, you see that there has been steady growth from 15 percent to 80 percent consumption over that time. There are even times when usage spikes into the hovering 90s.

4. You click the NetFlow Traffic Analyser tab, and then click the uplink at that site. Here, you look at the top 50 endpoints and inspect that a group of computers in the 10.10.12.0-10.10.12.255 IP range is consuming the bulk of the bandwidth. These computers reside in your internal sales IP range. You depart to drill into each of the offending IP addresses.

Everyone IP you investigate shows the file-sharing program Kazaa (port 1214) and the MMORPG World of Warcraft (port 3724) in the Top 5 applications.

The Solution
5. You push a new configuration to your firewall using Cirrus Configuration Manager that blocks all traffic on these two ports.

6. Within minutes, you see the traffic on your interface drop back to 25 percent. You may and hear the curses of the internal sales staff, as they were right in the middle of a raid in Blackrock Spire and had half of the second season of "Lost" downloaded, but blow open them to get over it and keep the raiding to their own time.

About the Author:
Stacey Crow is the sales director for Corona Technical Services, the only certified SolarWinds training provider in North America. Sign up for their training order at http://www.coronaservices.net to be taught all the ins and outs of the SolarWinds Orion network and make your life easier.

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