Capacity planning

Through Plixer Scrutinizer, Plixer One Enterprise can leverage the capabilities of the Plixer ML Engine to generate forecasts of future network activity for capacity planning:

  • Apply machine learning techniques to create dynamic baselines for network behavior

  • Extend any Plixer Scrutinizer Report into the future to forecast trends and predict changes to network activity

  • Use AI-/ML-driven data analysis to predict VPN trends, proactively plan capacity, and align investments with business needs

  • Gain visibility into encrypted VPN tunnels to detect threats

  • Gain visibility into address pool utilization and trend its usage

  • Associate users, devices, and applications with the consumption of bandwidth

Overview

Plixer Scrutinizer includes multiple tools and functions that can enhance a network team’s capacity planning capabilities.

Traffic/behavior baselining

Using collected flow data, the Plixer ML Engine is able to create dynamic machine learning models of baseline network behavior.

Plixer One Enterprise can use these models to deliver additional capacity planning insights in two ways:

  • Alarms for behavioral deviations that exceed a certain threshold (based on the configured sensitivity) using the Plixer Network Intelligence Anomaly policy

  • Activity/deviation monitoring via Behavior tab when drilling into individual hosts from the Explore > Entities > Hosts view.

Reports

Plixer Scrutinizer’s customizable reports are designed to help teams get to the bottom of any inquiry.

For capacity planning, they can be used to investigate traffic saturation on top interfaces and help determine whether additional provisioning will be required.

Forecasts

Forecasting is a Plixer One Enterprise feature that allows users to create forecasts of future network activity.

A forecast can be generated from any saved report and will comprise projections for the traffic included by the report configuration (e.g., devices, filters, etc.). This gives teams the ability to define the exact network activity to be forecasted as part of capacity planning.

HD utilization projections

On the Admin > Resources > System Performance page, clicking on a Collector opens a view showing predicted HD utilization based on the current data retention settings. These projections can be used to ensure that sufficient disk space is always available to meet historical data storage needs.

Workflows

The following workflow(s) show how teams can leverage Plixer One Enterprise functions to enhance their capacity planning capabilities: