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Utilizing Garland’s TAPs in Flow-Based Network Traffic Monitoring

July 7, 2016

Photos courtesy of and copyright Free Range Stock, www.freerangestock.com

by Pavel Minarik, CTO of Flowmon Networks

In this technology-driven world, computer networks serve as the nervous system, ensuring delivery of business critical applications and services. This is why IT professionals need to know what is happening in their environment. Only with a detailed network visibility plan are they able to streamline troubleshooting, network operations and optimize the performance and security of an entire IT environment.

And this is where the Flowmon solution and Garland’s Aggregating Network Taps come in play. Let me tell you more...

Probes and Collectors Detect New and Advanced Threats


Chris Bihary described, in the recent post, how Garland’s Aggregating Network Taps provide the Flowmon Probes with 100% network visibility. The Probes monitor traffic via the TAP (which ensures capturing of all the traffic without dropping packets) and exports detailed statistics on network communication in the form of IP flows (NetFlow v5/v9, IPFIX) to Flowmon Collector for further analysis.

So we have all the necessary information, next we need to maximize their utilization.

What are the typical use cases?


Follow the architecture of the Flowmon solution in Figure 1. Flowmon is a comprehensive network monitoring and visibility platform, based on flow data (NetFlow, IPFIX and other standards) and Network Behavior Anomaly Detection technology. It includes high-performance flow statistics generating Probes for monitoring all types of networks up to 100 Gbps, Collectors to display and analyze network traffic and modules for advanced functions and analysis of flow statistics.

 Flowmon Architecture

Figure 1. The architecture of the Flowmon solution

As we can see, thanks to the flow data we are able to perform several network, application and security related tasks such as detection and diagnostics of operational and configuration issues (network troubleshooting), IP accounting, billing and capacity planning, meeting legal requirements such as data retention, improving performance of business applications, enhancing user experience and many others.

 How to See Your Baseline Traffic

An important benefit of network traffic monitoring technology based on flow data is protection and IT security. When we analyze network statistics, we gain a completely new perspective on the monitored infrastructure, allowing us to detect infected devices, malicious activities, attacks or network traffic anomalies in general. This technology is known as a network behavior analysis (NBA). Unlike signature-based solutions, NBA is able to detect new and advanced threats against which other security tools are ineffective.

We have introduced network traffic monitoring technology called Flowmon which utilizes information from flow data. To learn more, visit www.flowmon.com.

View joint solutions from Garland Technology and Flowmon.

See Everything. Secure Everything.

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Heartbeats Packets Inside the Bypass TAP

If the inline security tool goes off-line, the TAP will bypass the tool and automatically keep the link flowing. The Bypass TAP does this by sending heartbeat packets to the inline security tool. As long as the inline security tool is on-line, the heartbeat packets will be returned to the TAP, and the link traffic will continue to flow through the inline security tool.

If the heartbeat packets are not returned to the TAP (indicating that the inline security tool has gone off-line), the TAP will automatically 'bypass' the inline security tool and keep the link traffic flowing. The TAP also removes the heartbeat packets before sending the network traffic back onto the critical link.

While the TAP is in bypass mode, it continues to send heartbeat packets out to the inline security tool so that once the tool is back on-line, it will begin returning the heartbeat packets back to the TAP indicating that the tool is ready to go back to work. The TAP will then direct the network traffic back through the inline security tool along with the heartbeat packets placing the tool back inline.

Some of you may have noticed a flaw in the logic behind this solution!  You say, “What if the TAP should fail because it is also in-line? Then the link will also fail!” The TAP would now be considered a point of failure. That is a good catch – but in our blog on Bypass vs. Failsafe, I explained that if a TAP were to fail or lose power, it must provide failsafe protection to the link it is attached to. So our network TAP will go into Failsafe mode keeping the link flowing.

Glossary

  1. Single point of failure: a risk to an IT network if one part of the system brings down a larger part of the entire system.

  2. Heartbeat packet: a soft detection technology that monitors the health of inline appliances. Read the heartbeat packet blog here.

  3. Critical link: the connection between two or more network devices or appliances that if the connection fails then the network is disrupted.

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