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VIAVI Releases Observer 18

Viavi Solutions announced the availability of Observer 18, delivering end-user experience scoring, streamlined workflows and high-fidelity forensics, powered by a fast stream-to-disk platform.

This release of Observer combines streamlined workflows and ease of use with technical efficiencies and cost savings, for faster resolution of issues across teams - wherever they virtually are across cities or countries.

Observer 18 includes a range of features to support performance and security use cases, such as identifying users by name, determining where they connect, or automatically identifying when a host or service is communicating abnormally.

Key updates to the Observer Platform include:

- Custom-designed GigaStor Generation 4 hardware platform with up to 60 Gbps capture rate and accelerated analytics, providing fast access to stored packet data and analysis.

- Unique End-User Experience scoring, with automated domain isolation capabilities, turning mountains of raw data into clear, concise answers and next steps.

- Seamless unification of flow and packet data, enabling users to efficiently move from holistic site, application, or threat views to in-depth forensic analysis.

- Improvements in hardware design driving operational efficiency, from easier installation due to size reduction of 67 percent compared to the previous generation, to lower power consumption thereby reducing energy costs.

“As enterprise workforces and users become more distributed, and rely on applications located in multiple clouds, the resulting any-to-any networking model is susceptible to performance and security challenges,” said Charles Thompson, Senior Director, Enterprise and Cloud, VIAVI. “Observer 18 empowers stakeholders from business leaders to level 3 support with customizable, streamlined workflows and intuitive visualizations, based on the most complete data set available. When they take control, they can guarantee that both work and learning can happen, wherever it needs to happen.”

“Whether ensuring optimal end user experience or addressing security threats, maintaining IT service health begins with complete visibility into network traffic,” said Kevin Tolly, Founder of The Tolly Group. “The Tolly Group completed testing of the Observer GigaStor Gen4 product family. Models tested were rated at 20, 40, and 60 Gbps. Results met or exceeded the performance claims of VIAVI, including their fastest model which showed sustained packet capture of 60.5 Gbps with real-world enterprise packet size of approximately 400 bytes.”

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VIAVI Releases Observer 18

Viavi Solutions announced the availability of Observer 18, delivering end-user experience scoring, streamlined workflows and high-fidelity forensics, powered by a fast stream-to-disk platform.

This release of Observer combines streamlined workflows and ease of use with technical efficiencies and cost savings, for faster resolution of issues across teams - wherever they virtually are across cities or countries.

Observer 18 includes a range of features to support performance and security use cases, such as identifying users by name, determining where they connect, or automatically identifying when a host or service is communicating abnormally.

Key updates to the Observer Platform include:

- Custom-designed GigaStor Generation 4 hardware platform with up to 60 Gbps capture rate and accelerated analytics, providing fast access to stored packet data and analysis.

- Unique End-User Experience scoring, with automated domain isolation capabilities, turning mountains of raw data into clear, concise answers and next steps.

- Seamless unification of flow and packet data, enabling users to efficiently move from holistic site, application, or threat views to in-depth forensic analysis.

- Improvements in hardware design driving operational efficiency, from easier installation due to size reduction of 67 percent compared to the previous generation, to lower power consumption thereby reducing energy costs.

“As enterprise workforces and users become more distributed, and rely on applications located in multiple clouds, the resulting any-to-any networking model is susceptible to performance and security challenges,” said Charles Thompson, Senior Director, Enterprise and Cloud, VIAVI. “Observer 18 empowers stakeholders from business leaders to level 3 support with customizable, streamlined workflows and intuitive visualizations, based on the most complete data set available. When they take control, they can guarantee that both work and learning can happen, wherever it needs to happen.”

“Whether ensuring optimal end user experience or addressing security threats, maintaining IT service health begins with complete visibility into network traffic,” said Kevin Tolly, Founder of The Tolly Group. “The Tolly Group completed testing of the Observer GigaStor Gen4 product family. Models tested were rated at 20, 40, and 60 Gbps. Results met or exceeded the performance claims of VIAVI, including their fastest model which showed sustained packet capture of 60.5 Gbps with real-world enterprise packet size of approximately 400 bytes.”

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Enterprises today operate in a real-time environment where uninterrupted access to trusted data has become a baseline expectation for users, applications and automated systems. Traditional DataOps models, built on manual effort and human triage, cannot keep pace with this always active demand. AI agents are emerging as the operational backbone, ensuring consistent data availability, reinforcing trustworthiness and enabling a level of scale that manual processes cannot achieve ...

For decades, trust in the digital workplace rested on familiar signals. We trusted faces on video calls, voices on the phone, and emails that appeared to come from people we knew. These cues felt human and intuitive. They anchored how decisions were made, approvals were granted, and access was authorized. AI-powered deepfakes have quietly broken that model ...

Cloud migration was supposed to be a one-way door. For most enterprises, it turns out it isn't. Cloud data repatriation is a real and growing trend. A new survey ... finds that 89% of organizations plan to expand their on-premises infrastructure footprint over the next two years — and 75% have already moved at least some workloads back from public cloud in the past 24 months. The findings point to a broad rethinking of where data belongs ...

Over the past few years, large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized the software industry. Given their ability to excel at multi-step reasoning, LLMs have helped enterprises streamline workflows and adapt to the unknown. However, employing such models comes with sky-high costs, latency issues, and limited flexibility. In the realm of IT operations, it is generally wiser to employ smaller, domain-specific models instead ...

For years, DevOps teams operated under a simple assumption: collect enough telemetry, and you can find and fix any problem. That assumption is breaking down. Modern enterprises now operate across microservices, hybrid cloud environments, APIs, Kubernetes, and highly automated delivery pipelines. Releases happen continuously, dependencies shift constantly, and failures spread faster than teams can diagnose them ...

New Relic surveyed IT and engineering leaders from the media and entertainment (M&E) sector to understand what's working — and where challenges persist with their observability practices. The findings reveal how M&E organizations are navigating rising platform complexity, audience expectations, and AI-driven change. Below are five takeaways that stand out ...

Let me start with something I've seen play out more times than I can count. A team hits a wall with the cloud. Costs creep up, then spike. Performance starts to feel inconsistent. Someone in finance asks a simple question like "why did this double?" and nobody has a clean answer ... Maybe this isn't the right place for everything. That realization feels like a breakthrough, like you've identified the problem. In reality, you've just identified the starting line ...

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 24, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses network observability tool sprawl ... 

In cloud-native systems, scaling is often as simple as moving a slider. For on-premise databases, the stakes are different. Over-provisioning hardware is expensive. Under-provisioning leads to performance bottlenecks that are difficult to fix once the equipment is in the rack ...

When most people think about cybersecurity, they picture firewalls, encryption, and access controls — technical tools designed to protect systems and data. But beneath the technology lies a deeper set of principles about trust, decision-making, and resilience ... The best leaders don't eliminate risk. They manage it intelligently. And in many ways, cybersecurity offers a surprisingly useful playbook for doing exactly that ...