In the current climate of always-on business, with unpredictable demand spikes and ever present threats from hackers and malware, businesses need protections that will not be a burden over and above either a heavy workload, or a security crisis.
NetScout offers a range of services and products, based on a core set of IP packet inspection skills that even has its own patented abstraction layer, Adaptive Service Intelligence (ASI), to format data gathered.
According to Phil Gray, product manager, Voice Video Services, NetScout, the company’s approach has always been to focus on the packets.
“We very much believe that the truth lies in the packets that are flying from clients to server,” said Grey.
The company employs a passive monitoring technique that does not add an overhead to existing traffic. This is particularly useful, says Grey, when there is an incident underway or an application or server under pressure. Instead of adding to the burden with an agent or active polling, NetScout’s services passively monitor traffic, capturing for analysis, applying its ASI and presenting information as the basis for intelligence from which to take action.
“We have a layer, like an abstraction layer above the packet, called Adaptive Service Intelligence (ASI), and what that does is understand all the applications and protocols, and extract a layer of metadata about the packet flows in order to bring structure and make sense of that,” said Grey.
What we do, Grey said, instead of having to deal with big stores of packets every time we want to extract information, at source, as we are looking at the packets going through, is extract a level of information that describes each of the sessions which is going on between the client and the server, so that we have already got one reduction of the data set. Then on the main central system, where we bring all the data back, we also produced grouped and dimension-related roll-ups, Grey said, which allow us to produce a higher layer of information about the flows, the application performance and the service performance.
This, said Grey, gives NetScout the edge in terms of both security and performance management.
Grey said that the services are all about getting the granularity of the packets into a manageable, normalised format that can yield real insights on network, server application performance and user experience.
NetScouts technology sits behind a range of products and services, for SMEs and enterprise. In enterprise, nGenius One is a service assurance platform that is complemented by the intelligent data sources service, which provides pervasive visibility for all applications and services that flow across an IP network for real-time and historical analysis. There are monitoring services for unified communications, monitoring switches and taps, and analysis modules for “collecting and viewing evidence through high-fidelity reconstruction of captured network traffic, including email, social media, chat, web, voice, and video”.
Grey said that NetScout has seen significant adoption of its technologies across financial sectors, such as trading and card services, in the public sector, and healthcare. However, Grey pointed out that any business with critical services or applications can benefit from its monitoring and reporting capabilities.
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