Introduction
As the traffic throughput continues to increase on Service Provider networks, it becomes more difficult to scale the analytic tools infrastructure. Operators struggle with the scalability of their tools and the ever-increasing volumes of traffic.
Typically, analytic tools rely on processing raw traffic. Scaling the tools with increasing volumes of subscriber traffic can be challenging. Gigamon’s Subscriber-Aware Metadata solution (SAM) can alleviate the challenge by forwarding only the metadata. The metadata that is exported is control and user plane correlated, which can save processing cycles on the tools that can otherwise be leveraged for analyzing security threats. Service providers can fine-tune the metadata to be analyzed to optimize their KPIs. The solution can also seamlessly integrate with other traffic reduction capabilities such as Whitelisting and Sampling to achieve better ROIs.
This Gigamon Validated Design (GVD) illustrates deploying the Subscriber-Aware Metadata solution on the 3G/4G network.
Design Overview
The following figure illustrates deploying the solution at a single site on a Service Provider's 3G/4G Core Network.
This solution requires two GigaSMART engines on the Gigamon device, one for processing the control plane traffic that is tapped from the core network and the other for processing the user plane traffic. Both engines produce metadata, which is correlated by the SMAF (Sub Metadata Aggregation Function) server. The correlated record is exported in JSON format to the tools for further analysis.
To learn more about this solution, read complete details on the Gigamon Community: Generating Subscriber Aware Metadata on 3G 4G mobile traffic (5.11).
