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Visibility by Design for Application/Network Performance Monitoring and Security

August 17, 2017

The Network Matters

We recently formalized a technology partnership with Savvius, a company I’ve been working with since early in my career when they were called WildPackets. The Savvius and Garland Technology partnership adds value to companies deploying the Savvius Omnipeek, Spotlight or Omnipliance APM/NPM solutions.

In today’s enterprise networks and data centers, IT professionals need visibility and access to the data anytime, from anywhere to perform real-time monitoring and analysis of application and network behavior. As well as the often overlooked scenario - delayed analysis.

Let’s dive into the new Savvius and Garland joint solution, case study and learn more about our upcoming webinar.

Scalable Visibility and Anytime Access

With the Garland + Savvius pre-certified deployment solution, enterprise and data center architects are assured the APM/NPM solution they are deploying has:

  • Full Network Visibility: Leaves no blind spots for network investigation or security planning. Network data is monitored in real-time, and stored for a playback analysis.
  • Simple to Deploy: Pre-certified solution makes it easy to deploy and manage in any kind of environment.
  • Easily Scalable: Scales programmatically with virtual machines to millions of flows, multi-gigabit capture-to-disk rates, and multi-terabyte storage capacity.

How it Works: Garland + Savvius:

EdgeLens®, Garland’s hybrid bypass TAP with packet broker functionality provides visibility for a hybrid configuration of an active, in-line network device and off-line or “out-of-band” tools, such as Savvius. EdgeLens provides identical network traffic streams through the active in-line device and to the capture engine of Savvius Spotlight or Omnipeek monitoring and analysis applications.

Before and After

The Benefits of Both Devices Seeing the Same Traffic:

  • Historical lookback (before/after) and playback of the network traffic
  • Real-time events correlation for security and forensics
  • Validating network policy changes and spotting violations
  • Root cause analysis for application and network related problems

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Real World Applications: Ensuring Permissible Packet Capture for Digital Legal Evidence

The Garland + Savvius pre-certified solution was recently deployed to provide real time tracking and analysis of big data to IT Forensics, that included packet captures permissible for legal evidence in criminal trials.

The Garland + Savvius Solution Ensures:

  • Real time network access using passive network TAPs
  • Reliable mirroring of the network traffic with network TAPs
  • Reliable 100% packet capture with network TAPs and Savvius Omnipliance
  • PTP timestamp with Savvius Omnipliance
  • Network forensics with Savvius Omnipliance
  • Capture of evidence with Savvius Omnipliance

Watch our Joint Webinar: Visibility by Design for APM/N


With the spine leaf architecture and increased virtualization in the data center/private cloud, network architects and CIOs are challenged with how to scale the visibility cost effectively. In this webinar, Chris Bihary, CEO of Garland Technology and Nadeem Zahid, Head of Strategy/BusDev at Savvius, will discuss:

  • The challenges of the changing data center architecture and virtualization
  • How to balance TAP vs. SPAN
  • How best to scale with Savvius+Garland solution within your budget

Watch the recorded webinar on our Savvius Technology partner page. 

 

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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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