How Application Intelligence Works

Figure 1 illustrates how the Application Intelligence solution works.

Figure 1

Application Intelligence Solution

The Gigamon device that is configured with the Application Intelligence capability receives the traffic through the network ports. Application Visualization (earlier it was known as Application Monitoring) forwards the network traffic to the GigaSMART engine that exports applications related information to GigaVUE-FM, which renders the information on the Application Intelligence Dashboard. Based on the pass or drop rules configured in the maps, Application Filtering Intelligence lets relevant applications be guided to the tools. In this example, you can see that except some of the audio or video streaming applications such as Spotify®, YouTube, and Netflix, other applications are filtered out and dropped, and sent to the security tool. This is because the audio or video streaming applications are high-volume, low-risk traffic. The threat detection tool need not inspect such traffic. Hence, these applications are dropped based on the configured drop rules.

Application Metadata Intelligence allows you to export metadata from applications that are detected in the network traffic. The records can be exported to a collector either in IPFIX or CEF format through the IP interface or the management interface. You can also use the application metadata attributes for purposes other than security, such as to determine the network or application health, to track the long-lived sessions seen in the network, and so on.