Enabling Application Classification
To enable application classification in your 128T, inside the configuration, go to the router in which you want to turn application classification on, and go to the section titled “Application Identification.”
In this section, select “ADD” and select either “module” or “tls.” If you select "tls", then that enables application classification for TLS traffic, like HTTPS. Basically, the 128T will parse the X.509 certificate from the TLS Handshake to figure out which applications are being accessed.
If you select “module,” then that enables application classification for the modules that you can configure. The modules allow your 128Ts to identify well known applications automatically by going straight to the source. Every 128T is shipped with an Office 365 module which grabs the URLs and IP addresses from Microsoft. You also have the ability to input your own modules as well. They are stored in /etc/128technology/application-modules/ in your linux shell.
You can enabled both "tls" and "module" at the same time if you like, or just pick one. Either way, once you do that, all you need to do is validate and commit your configuration.
Why Enable Application Classification?
Let's discuss some of the benefits of enabling application classification. First off, with application classification enabled, you can go to the Application Dashboard (in the Dashboard menu) and select Create Service right from the identified application and go straight to the configuration for that service. This gives you the ability to easily create services for applications right after the 128T sees your clients access them.
Now, once you have these applications created as services, you can start to control them. By control them, I mean, you can add access policies to them, you can apply traffic shaping to them, you can determine which tenants have access to that service, and you can set service routes to determine which paths your different types of traffic take. To see what other things you can do with services, check out the Video: Services in 128T.
Example
Here’s an example. Let’s say that through application classification, you notice that a lot of people on your network are streaming movies from Netflix as well as using WebEx for video conferencing. In fact, it appears that in your network, these two types of traffic are competing with each other for bandwidth. So, what do you do?
First thing is you turn them both into services. Next, you will want to use the Video: Traffic Engineering Using 128T to have your WebEx traffic prioritized as “High” and your Netflix to go down to “Best Effort.” Next, you create a service-route that sends your Netflix traffic out a path that you do not care about and your WebEx traffic out a reliable high bandwidth path. Alternatively, you can just set up an access policy on the Netflix traffic to deny access to that service for any users.
#ApplicationClassification