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Flow reporting should have the options to be more device agnostic and have more dynamic selection capabilities, other than the selection of filters that are done within the widget definition.

See this idea on ideas.ibm.com

The ideal option would be a pop-up selection window (selecting something where the variables are currently placed). Provides options such as:

1. Select a client/server role and then select from a list such as a network segment or host grouping that is to be included or excluded.
2. Select from a list such as a network segment or host grouping that is to be included or excluded as the counterpart to the first selection.
3. Select from a list such as an application or “protocol mapping / service mapping / category mapping” that is to be included or excluded as the counterpart to the first selection.

The above will allow the reporting to show (utilization, breakdown etc) for the following examples. Site here can be collection of subnets (network segment), representing hosts, region, BU, country etc. (that could even be based around metadata).

  • What are the sites or users that are targeting a set of hosts / applications?

  • For a group of hosts / applications, what sites or users are consuming the traffic?

  • Traffic between sites e.g. London and Tokyo

  • What are the topN for a site or selection of hosts

In these basic examples, the user does not need to know what device grouping, device or interface to select – only cares for example about host, subnet and application groupings that are meaningful / descriptive.

Flow reporting should also have the option for results to be further refined based on the “column headings” of a generated report (i.e. based on the Flow View selected). Whilst this does exist within the widget settings it's lost to a Report Consumer if a filter hasn’t been created as part of the widget configuration which makes this very limiting.

Idea priority Urgent
  • Admin
    Krishnan Subramanian
    May 27, 2025

    @Guest comments -

    So in simple terms it seems to come down to "Hosts, subnets or groups" and "Peer hosts, subnets or groups" really just a group of subnets / ports for each of these (that have been "manually" defined.

    So we want to see traffic between this "complex rule" and "another complex rule" where a complex rule for example, teams is as per https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/enterprise/urls-and-ip-address-ranges?view=o365-worldwide52.112.0.0/14, 52.122.0.0/15, 2603:1063::/38UDP: 3478, 3479, 3480, 3481

    So if a complex rule can be created (by an admin) and then shared, so available for anyone to use (as per their example). If we can do this we'd be 80% or more across the most common use cases CIO use Riverbed for.

    Let me know if this makes sense and want to drill more into. I can raise an idea but this is really the explanation of the idea previously raised (flow reporting that is not device-centric)

  • Admin
    Krishnan Subramanian
    May 27, 2025

    it looks like we want make it easier and more flexible for the user to have pre-defined/ saved flow filters that match business logic and that can be used to quickly drill into the report data and do enrichment/name resolution/grouping of the results

    business logic would include complex filters for hosts, subnets, regions, apps

    reference points of existing functionality are named segments/subnets used for grouping/resolution at report time and app profiles/category used for grouping/resolution at ingestion but limited to 5-tuple in terms of flow fields.

    We should extend this profile definition to all fields in the flow records like Kubernetes node/pod/namespace for example.

    Provide API support to provision these profiles via script

  • Admin
    Krishnan Subramanian
    Mar 28, 2025

    @Guest

    this idea look similar to https://bigblue.aha.io/ideas/ideas/SEV1-I-410

    As we discussed, these use cases are possible using flow filters that make use of network segments/subnets. We can make it easier for the user by providing report variables for filters and support for more complex filters ( which will be available in 8.0)