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.
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.
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.