Cisco Systems Cisco Systems Identification and treatment of application flows are critical for the successful deployment and operation of applications. Historically, this functionality has been accomplished to the extent possible using heuristics, which inspect and infer flow characteristics. Heuristics may be based on port ranges, network separation, or deep packet inspection (DPI). But many application flows in current usages are dynamic, time-bound (short lived for some of them), possibly encrypted (TLS for signaling), peer-to-peer, possibly asymmetric, and used on non-dedicated devices, any combination of which renders such techniques less effective or results in compromises to application security or user privacy.