Are You Drowning in BIG DATA?
“Big data” is a term used to describe the massive amount of data produced by a new generation of systems and applications. Although the definition is necessarily subjective, most analysts use the term in reference to terabytes, exabytes or even zettabytes of data. Does “big data” mean big trouble? While this clearly puts a strain on data storage infrastructures, it also has an impact on application performance.
“Because big data increases network traffic, transactions and overall complexity, it creates the potential for a wide range of application-performance issues such as latency, task incompletion and data loss,” said Rob Edinger, CISSP & Audit and Security Practice Manager, Milestone Systems. “There’s no sign that data growth is going to slow down anytime soon, so it is essential for organizations to have an application performance management (APM) solution that can handle large volumes.”
Traditional APM solutions lack the speed and flexibility to keep up with increasingly complex and dynamic IT environments. Milestone Systems is partnering with ExtraHop Networks to deliver a solution that provides increased visibility, faster troubleshooting, and ultimately better application performance in big data environments.
The Big Picture
The ExtraHop Application Delivery Assurance system is a real-time, passive network appliance that monitors and analyzes every business-critical transaction from L2-L7 across network, web, database and storage tiers, spanning physical and virtual environments. The massively scalable ExtraHop system combines the troubleshooting capabilities of Network Performance Managers with the superior application-level visibility of User Experience Monitors to perform sophisticated network-traffic analysis.
While many tools rely on legacy technologies such as NetFlow collection, SNMP polling, custom performance agents or active service checks, the ExtraHop system performs full-stream reassembly and full-content analysis to extract and archive valuable performance and health metrics in a real-time datastore.
“Because it is a network-based approach, the ExtraHop Application Delivery Assurance system is a much more scalable approach in the age of big data,” said Edinger. “There are no agents to deploy, configure, reconfigure and update. There is no performance overhead on application servers. There is no need to store, index and process packet captures offline.”
The ExtraHop system is an out-of-line device that analyzes a copy of the production network traffic in real time, extracting the valuable health and performance information. Rather than sample a portion of network traffic, the ExtraHop system processes every packet at wire speed. With a throughput of 10Gbps and support for up to 1,000 network devices, it can analyze tens of thousands of transactions simultaneously and in real time.
Warning Signs
When the ExtraHop system detects a problem, its built-in alerting engine sends out a warning that helps organizations avert disaster. In addition to simple threshold-based alerts, the ExtraHop system “learns” from the data it analyzes to produce sophisticated trend-based alerts. Trend-based alerts use historical context to learn normal behavior and send notifications when anomalies are detected.
“Customer satisfaction, employee productivity and the overall efficiency of the business all depend on IT’s ability to guarantee reliable application responsiveness,” said Edinger. “However, delivering applications at network speed has become significantly more challenging in the age of ‘big data,’ and most IT organizations continue to struggle with tools that are inadequate for today’s troubleshooting, performance-tuning, and capacity-planning needs. ExtraHop brings a brand-new approach to help IT organizations tackle these problems head-on.”
Let Milestone Systems help you control your big data. Call 877-771-9510
