Today there are a lot of startups in Silicon Valley and beyond trying to figure out how to manage applications in the modern hybrid infrastructure. Some of the best solutions however are coming from companies with a history in Networking. I have been doing Network Monitoring and Analytics since before Network Analytics became a “thing” in the past few years. Netscout feels like an old friend with a new makeover. Netscout was founded in 1984, which is the same year Cisco was founded. Netscout grew up as network monitoring company, I remember my days of using Netscout in the 1990s, quite well, but I had not taken a fresh look until recently, at Tech Field Day Xtra at VMworld. As the industry evolves into software designed and hybrid cloud, NetScout has evolved as a company. The network is the only component that has full visibility to all traffic that passes through the Data Center, it is only natural that Netscout with its history in network monitoring has figured this out with a solid solution.
Applications are moving, from public to private clouds and multi-clouds, the movement to microservices, and containers is not slowing. Managing a hybrid environment is very complex. Netscout answers this by providing a single tool that gives visibility into the complex hybrid, multi-cloud environment.
Netscouts original product for Network Monitoring was an appliance with taps. Today they have products that address Network Assurance, Application Assurance, and Infrastructure Assurance with options that are virtual and physical. Netscout can monitor east-west traffic including traffic in Docker and Kubernetes environments.
vScout NSX Edition was announces to VMworld 2018, it is nGenius which uses ASI, Adaptive Service Intelligence, which translates the packets to smart data including network response time and application response time. This information can then be used with NSX for microsegmentation. While other products can provide the data, NetScout has the ability to interpret the data, including deep packet inspection and provide smart data. Monitoring alone can create an overwhelming amount of data which is difficult to interpret, ASI does the interpretation for us. Beyond using this information for NSX, the data can be forwarded to other security tools via API integration.
When considering a full Network Monitoring and Analytics platform, don’t overlook NetScout. They are definitely on my radar.