Net Optics announced the introduction of the xStream 4.0 Family for network monitoring.
The xStream 4.0 Family brings together a spectrum of advanced capabilities for ease of use and an improved customer experience. Seamless integration and smooth scalability complement powerful, high-performance monitoring and load balancing—all fortified with agile, intuitive management.
“Our new platform delivers ‘three-click-manageability,’” said Sharon Besser, Net Optics Vice President of Technology. “That’s because xStream 4.0 makes it as easy as one-two-three to achieve quick link aggregation, network packet brokering and advanced load balancing. We challenged ourselves to redefine total visibility and control and create a new model for network monitoring.”
According to a recent Gartner report by Jonah Kowall and Debra Curtis, “The use of network packet brokers (NPBs) allows better visibility into and longevity of tool investments spanning network performance monitoring (NPM), application performance monitoring (APM), security, network forensics and other monitoring technologies that require packet data.”
The xStream 4.0 Family gives customers numerous ways to protect the data that is the lifeblood of their networks. Innovative features and capabilities enhance network monitoring and security, including multiple load balancing methods, packet manipulation options, added filtering capabilities, and advanced third-party integration choices for quick, accurate troubleshooting and resolution. With its ultra-low latency 480G backplane, the platform supports all 1G networks as well as those migrating to 10G. Its ability to double the number of available ports helps customers maximize the value and utility of their equipment.
Included in the xStream 4.0 Platform are:
- xBalancer is designed forhigh-volume, high-speed load-balancing in 10G and 1G networks—monitoring network traffic and cost-effectively preventing tool overburdening. xBalancer distributes the traffic to multiple monitoring tools, an efficient approach to optimizing current resources by sharing the load caused by processing high traffic volumes.
- Director xStream 4.0 Data Monitoring Switch aggregates, regenerates, switches, filters, and load balances monitoring traffic. With the highest density of 10G ports, Director xStream empowers the NOC to share a pool of monitoring tools across a large number of network links.
- iLink Agg xStream 4.0 Monitoring Link Aggregator combines traffic from as many as 20 network links or Span ports and sends it to four monitoring tools. It automatically performs all data-rate and media-type conversions, enabling 10G traffic to be sent to 1G appliances, and 1G traffic to 10G tools—protecting a company’s security appliance investment.
The Latest
Like most digital transformation shifts, organizations often prioritize productivity and leave security and observability to keep pace. This usually translates to both the mass implementation of new technology and fragmented monitoring and observability (M&O) tooling. In the era of AI and varied cloud architecture, a disparate observability function can be dangerous. IT teams will lack a complete picture of their IT environment, making it harder to diagnose issues while slowing down mean time to resolve (MTTR). In fact, according to recent data from the SolarWinds State of Monitoring & Observability Report, 77% of IT personnel said the lack of visibility across their on-prem and cloud architecture was an issue ...
In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 23, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses the NetOps labor shortage ...
Technology management is evolving, and in turn, so is the scope of FinOps. The FinOps Foundation recently updated their mission statement from "advancing the people who manage the value of cloud" to "advancing the people who manage the value of technology." This seemingly small change solidifies a larger evolution: FinOps practitioners have organically expanded to be focused on more than just cloud cost optimization. Today, FinOps teams are largely — and quickly — expanding their job descriptions, evolving into a critical function for managing the full value of technology ...
Enterprises are under pressure to scale AI quickly. Yet despite considerable investment, adoption continues to stall. One of the most overlooked reasons is vendor sprawl ... In reality, no organization deliberately sets out to create sprawling vendor ecosystems. More often, complexity accumulates over time through well-intentioned initiatives, such as enterprise-wide digital transformation efforts, point solutions, or decentralized sourcing strategies ...
Nearly every conversation about AI eventually circles back to compute. GPUs dominate the headlines while cloud platforms compete for workloads and model benchmarks drive investment decisions. But underneath that noise, a quieter infrastructure challenge is taking shape. The real bottleneck in enterprise AI is not processing power, it is the ability to store, manage and retrieve the relentless volumes of data that AI systems generate, consume and multiply ...
The 2026 Observability Survey from Grafana Labs paints a vivid picture of an industry maturing fast, where AI is welcomed with careful conditions, SaaS economics are reshaping spending decisions, complexity remains a defining challenge, and open standards continue to underpin it all ...
The observability industry has an evolving relationship with AI. We're not skeptics, but it's clear that trust in AI must be earned ... In Grafana Labs' annual Observability Survey, 92% said they see real value in AI surfacing anomalies before they cause downtime. Another 91% endorsed AI for forecasting and root cause analysis. So while the demand is there, customers need it to be trustworthy, as the survey also found that the practitioners most enthusiastic about AI are also the most insistent on explainability ...
In the modern enterprise, the conversation around AI has moved past skepticism toward a stage of active adoption. According to our 2026 State of IT Trends Report: The Human Side of Autonomous AI, nearly 90% of IT professionals view AI as a net positive, and this optimism is well-founded. We are seeing agentic AI move beyond simple automation to actively streamlining complex data insights and eliminating the manual toil that has long hindered innovation. However, as we integrate these autonomous agents into our ecosystems, the fundamental DNA of the IT role is evolving ...
AI workloads require an enormous amount of computing power ... What's also becoming abundantly clear is just how quickly AI's computing needs are leading to enterprise systems failure. According to Cockroach Labs' State of AI Infrastructure 2026 report, enterprise systems are much closer to failure than their organizations realize. The report ... suggests AI scale could cause widespread failures in as little as one year — making it a clear risk for business performance and reliability.
The quietest week your engineering team has ever had might also be its best. No alarms going off. No escalations. No frantic Teams or Slack threads at 2 a.m. Everything humming along exactly as it should. And somewhere in a leadership meeting, someone looks at the metrics dashboard, sees a flat line of incidents and says: "Seems like things are pretty calm over there. Do we really need all those people?" ... I've spent many years in engineering, and this pattern keeps repeating ...