"Big Data" is among the hottest topics in business today. Executives want to know how to gain actionable insights and make decisions from the flood of data and metadata pouring out of their networks. That's good – it's their job to look for any way they can increase sales, reduce waste, and generally improve their business efficiency. But to get to those actionable insights, you first have to make some kind of sense of all this data.
Volume, Velocity and Variety
The three attributes of Big Data are volume, velocity and variety. Each one brings its own challenge to your network infrastructure and specifically to the network monitoring system you use to collect, capture and analyze your data.
Big Data flows out of Big Networks – the high-capacity architecture that supports a previously inconceivable amount of commerce and communication. You need to tap into that gigantic flow of data, recognize what you're seeing, and organize it for the deep analysis that yields the answers you're looking for.
To do all that, you need intelligent network monitoring switches that are big enough and fast enough to work at the volume and velocity of the data you're after. They also need to be able to identify and organize the variety of data flowing through your network. The network monitoring switch must possess the capability to create order out of chaos of this massive data flow.
How Much Data Can You Afford To Analyze?
In the business world, nothing of value comes for free. The tools required to analyze your data and get the answers you need are not cheap. Big Data can easily overwhelm individual tools – and you can't get the true answer by sampling a little bit of Big Data here and there. You need to own all the data to get the whole picture, and that can run up a huge expense.
An innovative network data collection strategy, based on intelligent network monitoring switches, will let you tame the torrent. You can render Big Data manageable with a much smaller set of tools, and that keeps your network analysis costs under control.
Intelligent Network Monitoring
Today's intelligent network monitoring switches can gather, collate, filter, process and distribute packets to analysis tools, assuring data visibility, stability, security and optimization of your tool investment.
Here are a few features of state-of-the-art intelligent network monitoring switches that make it possible to manage Big Data:
- Packet deduplication culls the stream of duplicate information that can make up 40% of network monitoring system traffic. You need to eliminate duplication to get a good look at the real data. Filtering out duplicate packets also saves money because you're not buying multiple tools or incremental tool licenses to analyze the same data over and over again.
- Packet slicing strips data packets of bits that are unnecessary for certain tools. Packet payloads can be removed for IDS tools that do not need payload information to perform their work. Credit card numbers and social security numbers can be sliced away when packets are sent to traffic analysis tools. This lightens the load while serving the dual purpose of increasing throughput efficiency and maintaining security regulatory compliance.
- Time stamping allows you to know the exact moment – within fewer than 10 nanoseconds – when some event happened on your network, in precise relation to the last event and the next event. With Big Data, when something happened can be as important as what happened. By stamping each packet with its exact time of entry, you create a new level of metadata that allows your analysis tools to precisely reconstruct a sequence of events.
- Multi Stage Filtering techniques simplify the process of sorting unstructured data. To be used effectively, each analysis tool needs to receive a complete set of accurate traffic; nothing more and definitely nothing less. Multi Stage Filtering takes a Big Data input stream and directs it through a series of filters that you design, carefully sorting the individual data packets and directing them to tools or to additional filters for pinpoint accuracy. When you eliminate irrelevant packets from a tool's input stream, you get the full value of your data without wasting resources.
There's more, but these are the newest features that allow intelligent network monitoring to reduce and organize Big Data into something you can use to understand the flow of activity in your business more effectively. Intelligent network monitoring turns on the light to let you see Big Data clearly.
ABOUT Richard Rauch
Richard Rauch, President and CEO of APCON, founded the company in 1993 to provide state-of-the-art network connectivity to a wide variety of industries. Today, he is the driving force behind the research and development of APCON networking technology, and has built the company into a leading supplier of intelligent network monitoring products.
Related Links:
The Latest
Interestingly, some experts say that — although convergence is happening, and sharing the data has great value — the security dashboards should not necessarily be combined with observability dashboards for ITOps, NetOps or DevOps ...
The experts have all agreed that security teams can gain great benefits from utilizing observability data. But does this mean security and observability tools should be integrated, or even combined? ...
One reason why observability and security make a good pairing is that traditional telemetry signals — metrics, logs, and traces — are helpful to maintain both performance and security ...
Observability and security — are they a match made in IT heaven, or a culture clash from IT hell? Sorry to be so dramatic, but it's actually a serious question that has gravity. The convergence of observability and security could change IT operations as we know it. And many IT authorities see this as a good thing. With input from industry experts — both analysts and vendors — this 8-part blog series to be posted over the next two weeks will explore what is driving this convergence, the challenges and advantages, and how it may transform the IT landscape ...
The journey of maturing observability practices for users entails navigating peaks and valleys. Users have clearly witnessed the maturation of their monitoring capabilities, embraced DevOps practices, and adopted cloud and cloud-native technologies. Notwithstanding that, we witness the gradual increase of the Mean Time To Recovery (MTTR) for production issues year over year ...
Optimizing existing use of cloud is the top initiative — for the seventh year in a row, reported by 62% of respondents in the Flexera 2023 State of the Cloud Report ...
Gartner highlighted four trends impacting cloud, data center and edge infrastructure in 2023, as infrastructure and operations teams pivot to support new technologies and ways of working during a year of economic uncertainty ...
Developers need a tool that can be portable and vendor agnostic, given the advent of microservices. It may be clear an issue is occurring; what may not be clear is if it's part of a distributed system or the app itself. Enter OpenTelemetry, commonly referred to as OTel, an open-source framework that provides a standardized way of collecting and exporting telemetry data (logs, metrics, and traces) from cloud-native software ...
As SLOs grow in popularity their usage is becoming more mature. For example, 82% of respondents intend to increase their use of SLOs, and 96% have mapped SLOs directly to their business operations or already have a plan to, according to The State of Service Level Objectives 2023 from Nobl9 ...
Observability has matured beyond its early adopter position and is now foundational for modern enterprises to achieve full visibility into today's complex technology environments, according to The State of Observability 2023, a report released by Splunk in collaboration with Enterprise Strategy Group ...