Optimizing Application Monitoring using Gigamon HAWK Solution (5.15)

Introduction

The role of data centers has started to minimize with enterprises moving towards virtualization and cloud space. With the migration of enterprise applications to Cloud and to connect with businesses world wide, enterprises need to open up their networks. Also, applications nowadays are rich in media, animations, and other heavy content. These take a toll on the existing network infrastructure especially the tools used for analyzing the business telemetry. These tools necessarily don't require the full packet stream for their analysis but would just need a few initial packets in each transaction. However, the network architecture is configured to send the whole packet stream leading to low efficiency of tools and subsequently a huge expenditure in scaling the tools to meet the business demand.

In this GVD, we will be exploring how GigaSMART® Advanced Flow Slicing (AFS)  could be applied in tandem with GigaSMART® Application filtering Intelligence to optimize the data sent to the monitoring tools. The tools will expect only the necessary leading packets of the traffic stream.

Refer to Gigamon Validated Designs section of Gigamon community documentations for more such designs. Please check with your Gigamon Sales contact or Gigamon Support for more information regarding the support for the cloud/virtualization platform that you are considering.

Design Topology


Design Overview

The design topology illustrates the deployment of Gigamon Cloud Suite in VMware's vCenter environment. The monitored traffic from the interested workload has been acquired and applied with Application filtering Intelligence (AFI) to forward only the relevant traffic pertaining to the business and which requires further analysis.

In this GVD, traffic is acquired from VMware vCenter 7.0 and optimized to forward all web traffic (Http, ftp, and Https) to an IDS tool. Traffic optimization is done in four steps:

  • Traffic is filtered using Application filtering intelligence and forwarded to a Gigamon H Series device.
  • Traffic is further optimized in Gigamon H Series to filter only the clear text traffic as a whole for analysis.
  • Gigamon H Series also processes the traffic to forward only the header from the https traffic stream to the analytics tools.
  • Gigamon H Series applies Advanced flow slicing (AFS) to the packets.

To learn more about this solution, read complete details on the Gigamon Community: Optimizing-Application-Monitoring-using-Gigamon-HAWK-Solution-5-15