Managing the Network becomes far more challenging with today’s networks. Given fast-enough transmission and sufficient load, traditional data collection methods are unable to cope with data volumes. The result: traffic monitoring and visibility may be flawed or inaccurate.
As a board member of ONUG, Aryo Kresnadi is spearheading an effort to provide a set of tactical and strategic requirements aimed at guiding enterprise organizations in their design and selection criteria for traffic monitoring and traffic visibility solutions. Here’s what he has to say:
Tell us about the working group. What are its goals, accomplishments and status?
The working group will showcase the technology for how we improve visibility into traffic on the network infrastructure. This information is usually used for monitoring and analysis. With Software-Defined Networking (SDN), we think there’s the ability to better “stir” the traffic and gain better separation of the control and data planes for more accurate reading of the network. It’s up to ONUG to define the necessary features to make that happen. During ONUG Spring 2015 we demonstrated the beginning of that work, identifying the top 10 requirements needed for traffic monitoring and visibility. Now, during the fall, we are working with Ixia, our testing partner, to validate vendor compliance with those requirements.
What happened that made this initiative important to you and prompted you to get involved?
I was very interested in finding a way to reduce the cost and complexity of gathering real-time network data from high-speed networks. Today’s IP networks are under increasing load whether from virtualization and the constant movement of the virtual system, containers, the cloud and automation, big data, IP storage or network security. Gathering more and more raw data from big-bandwidth networks (10 Gbps and faster) is getting hard to accomplish. Data may be lost due to oversubscription or skewed by bandwidth contention between production traffic and monitoring-related traffic. Some information may be inaccessible due to regulatory concerns (PCI, HIPAA, PII, PAI, etc.) or encryption. Enterprises usually end up building a separate network just for data collection, further increasing their financial burden. Our working group is exploring options and solutions to this problem.
What is the value to the user?
As I mentioned, the long term value is that enterprises have more effective, more affordable data collection tools for high-speed networks. In the nearer term, ONUG Fall attendees will see how vendors are solving the problem, today.
What output can we expect?
Users who come to the ONUG conference will be able to see for themselves how vendors comply with our top ten product requirements for traffic monitoring and visibility. We build a test they can use to validate their implementations. They’ll present the results of those tests at ONUG Fall, results that we’ll also distribute as a document.