Finding out what is running over your network
The first thing to do when monitoring a new network is to find out what is running over it. There are various types of applications and network protocols, and they can influence and interfere with each other when all of them are running over the network.
In some cases, you will have different VLANs, different Virtual Routing and Forwarding (VRFs), or servers that are connected to virtual ports in a Bladeserver. Eventually everything is running on the same infrastructure, and they can influence each other.
Tip
There is a common confusion between VRFs and VLANs. Even though their purpose is quite the same, they are configured in different places. While VLANs are configured in the LAN in order to provide network separation in the OSI layers 1 and 2, VRFs are multiple instances of routing tables to make them co-exist in the same router. This is a layer 3 operation that separates between different customer's networks. VRFs are used in Multi Protocol...
