Lancope is expanding the visibility it provides to large, high-speed network environments through new support for the Cisco NetFlow Generation Appliance (NGA).

Purpose-built for high performance, Cisco NGA delivers a consistent, granular level of detail about network traffic flowing through every device by gathering raw traffic information, normalizing it into a NetFlow record, and then forwarding it to Lancope's StealthWatch System for analysis. The NGA provides visibility into intra-data center communications, for which network and security monitoring is typically lacking.

As more organizations recognize the benefits of flow collection and analysis for improving network and security operations, networking technology vendors including Cisco are expanding NetFlow enablement across their product lines. With so much available flow data, organizations require high-speed flow collection devices like StealthWatch, which can monitor up to 120,000 flows per second (fps) per collector, and up to 3 million fps total, to effectively digest all of the data and turn it into actionable intelligence.

“The release of the new Cisco NGA speaks to the criticality of flow data for maintaining secure, high-performance networks in the face of today’s dire security circumstances,” said Joe Yeager, director of product management for Lancope. “Cisco is leading the charge as more vendors add and expand support for flow telemetry in their products, particularly for areas such as intra-data center communications that are typically lacking from a monitoring perspective. Lancope continues to be at the forefront for providing a highly sophisticated, scalable and cost-effective means of interpreting all of the valuable flow data that can be gathered from these systems.”

Cisco NGA provides cost-effective, high-speed flow generation at up to 40 Gbps from platforms including Cisco Nexus 7000, Cisco Nexus 5000 and the Catalyst 6500 Series. Lancope and Cisco worked closely together to test StealthWatch with the NGA and ensure optimal performance. By consuming and analyzing flow data from Cisco NGA, StealthWatch provides the actionable insight required for effective network, application and security troubleshooting across large enterprise networks.

StealthWatch leverages NetFlow, IPFIX and other types of flow data from the NGA and additional infrastructure to address the full spectrum of internal and external threats facing today’s networks. In addition to expediting both network and security troubleshooting, the system can also support other efforts including forensic investigations, capacity planning and compliance.