Cisco® Catalyst® 6500 Series and Cisco 7600 Series Network Analysis Module (NAM) is a powerful network-aware performance monitoring solution that delivers unparalleled insight into network traffic to help you ensure the consistent and efficient delivery of applications and services to your end users.

Cisco Catalyst 6500 Series and Cisco 7600 Series NAM is a powerful performance monitoring solution designed to give you more visibility into your network than ever before. It shows you how the network is being used and how your users experience the services the network offers to help you improve network and application performance. Because Cisco NAM provides visibility for comprehensive performance analysis and simplified troubleshooting, it is ideally suited for today's dynamic, evolving enterprises.

The innovative design of Cisco NAM combines a rich set of embedded data collection and analysis capabilities with a remotely accessible, web-based management console, all of which reside on a single blade that is easily installed into the Cisco Catalyst 6500 Series Switch or the Cisco 7600 Series Router. Cisco NAM is available in two hardware versions, NAM-1 and NAM-2 (Figure 1) and offers extensive monitoring capabilities to meet diverse network analysis needs in scalable switching and routing environments. Cisco NAM includes a Traffic Analyzer GUI, which provides quick access to the configuration menus and presents easy-to-read performance reports on web, voice, and video traffic.

Monitoring Network and Application Usage
One of the foundations of Cisco NAM is its ability to look inside a live packet to gather information on applications, hosts, and conversations. Application monitoring identifies every application that has consumed bandwidth, reports how much bandwidth has been consumed, and detects which hosts are using which applications. Host and conversation-pair monitoring provides bandwidth consumption per host and shows you which hosts are talking to each other along with the amount of traffic each host is generating. Monitoring applications, hosts, and conversations can help you proactively spot bottlenecks before your network suffers blows to performance and availability. It can also help you improve the consistency and quality of both individual and overall network services since these metrics reveal usage patterns for users as well as for router and switch, interface, server, and application resources.

Besides delivering a real-time snapshot of bandwidth usage and consumption, Cisco NAM also delivers a continuous historical view of how the bandwidth was used so you can quickly decide when and where to make changes in network resources. Data can also be collected over a select period of time and then analyzed after the event to discover when an anomaly has occurred so it can be quickly resolved.