Network Forensics at 40G and 100G Speeds
February 23, 2016

Mandana Javaheri
Savvius

Share this

The 40G and 100G market will generate tens of billions of dollars in revenue in the next few years according to a recent Infonetics market forecast. Growth in traffic, which some analysts estimate will reach 50 to 60 percent annually, enables new opportunities but also puts enormous pressure on networks and creates new challenges.

Network forensics is one of these new challenges. Although network forensics is most commonly associated with investigating security incidents and breaches, it is also very valuable for providing visibility into network activities, troubleshooting issues quickly and diagnosing common network problems such as connectivity, unexpected change in utilization, or poor VoIP call quality.

Here are some of the ways you can prepare for successful network forensics as network speeds increase.

Know your Network

To identify anomalies, first you need to define or benchmark what is "normal" for your network. Your network performance solution is your best friend here. Baselining key business applications as well as measuring important network-based metrics such as packet size distribution, protocol and node usage will build an accurate model to know the normal behavior so you have something to compare to in case of problems.

Prepare for Everything

It is not just about having the right network forensics solution; you need the right infrastructure for your new, fast network as well. From your switches to your routers to your network packet brokers to your filtering criteria to your monitoring and forensics tools, everything has to be fast-speed compatible.

And most importantly you need to know your network and ask yourself the right questions:

What is your strategy?

Does it make sense to load-balance your traffic across multiple network forensics devices to get the full visibility?

Does it make sense to filter out the traffic you don't need?

What is your use case?

How do you usually find out there is an issue?

Is it by constantly monitoring the network or by receiving trouble tickets about performance?

Every network has its own specific needs, so make sure you know what those needs are and pick a network forensics partner that will help you meet them.

Smart Storage

One of the important components of making sure you have the network level data available to you when needed is defining the storage requirements. The faster the network becomes, the more storage is required to store what you need.

A fully utilized 1G network will generate 11TB of data per day. To control storage costs, you will need to get smarter about what is stored. This is only possible by knowing the network and your specific use cases. Techniques like filtering, packet slicing and load-balancing will help you use your storage more efficiently, while extended storage, SAN, and cloud-based technologies are also available if needed.

Depending on your network traffic, forensics and storage requirements, you should pick the amount and type of storage you require today and make sure it can scale to meet your needs in the future.

Intelligent Forensics

Searching through large amounts of packet data to find that essential little trace can be a frustrating process. So pick your search criteria and the type of analytics you need to run on your traffic wisely. Use your knowledge about the network baseline to define the forensics criteria. Make your search as focused as possible using filters. Define the time range, the application, the server or client which is experiencing the issue and drill down to as much detail as needed for troubleshooting. For example, if your problem is not VoIP or wireless related, don't use hardware resources to analyze those.

By knowing your network, using the right techniques and planning ahead, you can turn 40G and 100G network challenges into new opportunities.

Mandana Javaheri is CTO of Savvius.

Share this

The Latest

March 27, 2024

Nearly all (99%) globa IT decision makers, regardless of region or industry, recognize generative AI's (GenAI) transformative potential to influence change within their organizations, according to The Elastic Generative AI Report ...

March 27, 2024

Agent-based approaches to real user monitoring (RUM) simply do not work. If you are pitched to install an "agent" in your mobile or web environments, you should run for the hills ...

March 26, 2024

The world is now all about end-users. This paradigm of focusing on the end-user was simply not true a few years ago, as backend metrics generally revolved around uptime, SLAs, latency, and the like. DevOps teams always pitched and presented the metrics they thought were the most correlated to the end-user experience. But let's be blunt: Unless there was an egregious fire, the correlated metrics were super loose or entirely false ...

March 25, 2024

This year, New Relic published the State of Observability for Financial Services and Insurance Report to share insights derived from the 2023 Observability Forecast on the adoption and business value of observability across the financial services industry (FSI) and insurance sectors. Here are seven key takeaways from the report ...

March 22, 2024

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 4 - Part 2, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) discusses artificial intelligence and AIOps ...

March 21, 2024

In the course of EMA research over the last twelve years, the message for IT organizations looking to pursue a forward path in AIOps adoption is overall a strongly positive one. The benefits achieved are growing in diversity and value ...

March 20, 2024

Today, as enterprises transcend into a new era of work, surpassing the revolution, they must shift their focus and strategies to thrive in this environment. Here are five key areas that organizations should prioritize to strengthen their foundation and steer themselves through the ever-changing digital world ...

March 19, 2024

If there's one thing we should tame in today's data-driven marketing landscape, this would be data debt, a silent menace threatening to undermine all the trust you've put in the data-driven decisions that guide your strategies. This blog aims to explore the true costs of data debt in marketing operations, offering four actionable strategies to mitigate them through enhanced marketing observability ...

March 18, 2024

Gartner has highlighted the top trends that will impact technology providers in 2024: Generative AI (GenAI) is dominating the technical and product agenda of nearly every tech provider ...

March 15, 2024

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 4 - Part 1, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) discusses artificial intelligence and network management ...