The ability to data access for out-of-band monitoring is critical in maintaining day-to-day business operations. Demands continue to grow to report on and analyze data in motion for a number of reasons.
IT staff is faced with on-going challenges of:
- Port availability (span and/or tap) in order to connect a tool for out-of-band monitoring/recording
- Tool performance under heavy traffic
- Sharing of tools
- Budget constraints in purchasing new tools
In response to this business problem of accessing data for:
- Network troubleshooting (Sniffers, RMON probes, VoIP analyzers)
- Security (Compliance monitoring, forensics recording, IDS systems)
- Applications monitoring
- Transaction monitoring
Gigamon Systems delivers intelligent data access solutions via its GigaVUE and GigaStream series of platforms.
Gigamon’s data access solutions, managed/controlled via CLI and/or GUI, enable network and security staff to connect monitoring tools at network speeds to 10G.
Business benefits delivered by Gigamon:
- Enables 7x24 moves, adds and changes without affecting the network
- Increases network visibility by utilizing network tool aggregation
- Enables IT staff to utilize investment in 1G tools by monitoring 10G traffic with 1G tools
- Share data sources by replicating data to multiple tool ports
- Resolve contentions between Tap and SPAN ports (GigaVUE enables a single feed to be filtered and distributed to multiple tool ports)
- Solve tool deployment problems by enabling "ANY-TO-ANY" connectivity
- Improved monitoring fidelity by reducing packet loss
- Manage data to different tools by filtering traffic at network and tool ports and directing to one or more tool ports
Creative Solutions - ExtraHop and Gigamon
Highly complex application environments blur the line between applications and network management. Therefore, it is no longer possible to separate the network from the application.
Without complete visibility up to L7 (Application Layer), existing network tool technology lags behind in the technology curve. The resultant pain point is that applications and network staff spend 40% or more of their time identifying/solving the problem. Why did applications performance "head south"?
This is where Extrahop’s Application Assurance Delivery Systems helps with one, unified solution to solve problems. Extrahop ensures business-critical applications do not fail. It eliminates blamestorming between network, application and database engineers.
Extrahop’s Application Delivery Assurance system reconstructs all traffic flows to analyze payloads.
Extrahop is a passive appliance that requires a methodology for data access.
This is where Gigamon’s data access switch comes into play. Gigamon’s switch enables an infrastructure for out-of-band management, connecting network tools.
The Gigamon switch redirects the appropriate network traffic to Extrahop’s appliance in which the traffic flows are reconstructed. The combination of Extrahop’s appliance, coupled with Gigamon’s data access switch, delivers a very powerful solution across the entire IT environment.
