About Network Based Application Recognition (NBAR)

Network Based Application Recognition (NBAR) is an application classification engine used to recognize a wide variety of applications. It can detect both Web-based and client-server applications.

NBAR identifies applications and protocols in Layer 4 to layer 7 using the following information:

• Static TCP and UDP port numbers
• Non UDP or TCP IP protocols
• Dynamically assigned TCP and UDP port numbers
• Sub-port classification
• Deep packet inspection

Protocol Discovery is a NBAR feature that collects application and protocol statistics for each interface based on the results of the application identification. Flow Monitor collects these statistics from the interface using Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) to poll the NBAR PD Management Information Base (MIB) where these statistics are stored.

The Protocol Discovery feature captures key statistics associated with each protocol in a network. These statistics can be used to define traffic classes and QoS policies for each traffic class.