Whether you are proactively designing a network for a new office or data center location, or looking to make changes to your current infrastructure, there are a lot of questions to ask during the initial design phase.
Planning for the visibility needed within the network to ensure that any monitoring or analysis tools get all of the traffic they need to successfully perform their job, is getting more difficult every day. Networks are getting more complex, with higher speeds carrying an increasingly unprecedented amount of data. All of this complexity reinforces the need for a targeted visibility solution, using Network TAPs in place of SPAN ports as your access method for packet capture
Does Your Network Need:
- Data with a usable time stamp
- All data recorded - Good, Bad, Fragments.etc
- Interframe Gap studies.
- Real time data studies – VoIP, Video
- Real time data reports –RPC, QoS
- Jitter, Delay and Loss analysis
- CALEA, Lawful and/or Litigation evidence
- Visibility for security management
- Data Leak recognition
- Switch Load studies
- Application management
- Duplicate packet analysis
- Duplicate path analysis
If you answer yes to any of these – You need to use a Network TAP instead of a SPAN port for your access method. Ensuring data integrity is the foundation of your network traffic analysis. Without ensuring that every bit, byte and packet® of traffic is captured from the link you are monitoring or recording, you can’t be sure that your analysis will be accurate. 
This especially comes into play for post breach analysis, where you are trying to find out what the intruders accessed in your network and how they accomplished the breach. If you rely on SPAN ports, you can’t be sure that your data will have a reliable time stamp, that all data was passed to your analyzer tool, and even more importantly, your findings and report won’t be permissible in court. Best practice states to use a Network TAP!
[If I haven’t convinced you to use Network TAPs yet, download my whitepaper, TAP vs SPAN: Real Network Visualization Considerations for Professionals, today to learn more about this vital technology.]