Gigastor itself you can go into and pull packets out with Observer. For example if a server that “everything” talks to is down, the dashboard will show a ton of red due to all the connection attempts failing. It also trends and detects variations in baseline. It has an extremely fast and powerful filtering capability.Īt a glance I can immediately see if something is going on, like a lot of client traffic not completing three-way hand shakes. Every traffic flow captured by your TAPs is cataloged and analyzed and given a User Experience Score by some basic algorithms. Viavi Apex is one of the most underrated products is networking. But compared to NetScout the price is extremely competitive. Gigastor in turns feeds the metadata to Viavi Apex.Įvery north/south packet leaving or entering our datacenter is captured, along with at least 60-70% of east/west traffic. The packet broker switches feed Viavi Gigastor. SPAN/Port Mirroring supplements where it’s not feasible to place TAPs. In-Line optical network TAPs feed the Ixia packet broker switches. If you don't run a 24/7 analyzer you can always troubleshoot issues as they come up by grabbing ad hoc captures directly from the problematic servers and your network gear. They all serve their purposes and as long as you understand what data they do and don't provide they can be good enough, and easier on the wallet. With that said, most companies don't want to cough up the budget for them and so they get by using tools that leverage any of the above mentioned protocols. They are all $$$$ expensive to license and use a ton of resources for their back end but at the end of the day they give the best data, much more detailed than anything you can get from SNMP/Flow/Logs and APM traces.

Some competitive tools in the same space as netscout are gigamon and riverbed. Packet level analyzers are pretty much in a class all by themselves. The other tools mentioned in the thread so far are a pretty pale comparison to a packet analysis tool like Netscout, they aren't even in the same problem space really, but they are WAY easier on the budget.

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