The ever-evolving push toward faster networks that handle more traffic is hampering the ability of current tools to monitor that traffic effectively, according to Andy Huckridge, director of service provider solutions at Gigamon.
“Service providers are struggling to pay for the tools to be able to analyze all of this traffic,” Huckridge said, noting that average revenue per user has trended downward while network traffic has continued to grow at exponential rates – and the cost of monitoring a 1 gigabit versus a 10G, 40G or 100G network rises with network capabilities.
Gigamon launched a subscriber-aware IP sampling approach for network data analysis in its network visibility platform. The FlowVue capabilities are said to correlate subscriber identity, traffic type and quality of experience in order to build subscriber-centric insights and identification of issues. It’s also designed to scale network traffic to fit the throughput capacity of existing monitoring tools as traffic ebbs and flows so service providers “[avoid] the unnecessary traffic and tool dimensioning of over- and under-subscription across a wide set of tools,” according to the company.
“We’re scaling the traffic to sit the existing tools, rather than the need to scale the amount of tools,” Huckridge said. “Scaling the traffic to fit the tools, fits in the cost envelope the carrier can bear.”
In terms of the focus on subscriber-based analysis, Huckridge said being able to correlate based on subscriber ID or traffic type allows operators to focus their monitoring efforts – perhaps on high-value customers or services that support the cost of such attention. It also allows operators to build a picture of their customers’ usage and movement across the day.
Such insights also have applicability for “internet of things” devices, Huckridge added.
“It allows operators to apportion their spend of [monitoring] equipment on devices that will return that spend,” he said.
