In a recent interview, Ariana Lynn, Principal Analyst at The Fast Mode spoke to David Britt, Co-Founder & Chief Technical Officer of Byte25 on the impact of traffic visibility on modern IP networks. David joins us in a series of discussions with leading networking, analytics and cybersecurity companies, assessing the need for traffic filtering technologies that can deliver real-time, granular application awareness. The series explores how advanced analytics power various network functions amidst the rapid growth in traffic and applications.
Ariana: How do your solutions and products fulfill the demands of today's networks?
David: There are two fundamental characteristics of today’s networks; they are increasingly complex, and they are critical for business productivity. The network landscape continues to change. Applications are delivered from both remote cloud and on-premise services, user are highly distributed with an increasing mix of work-from home and in office workers, and the underlying technologies, such as SD-WAN, make enterprise wide visibility challenging.
Effective network visibility needs to track performance from the keyboard to the application. Byte25 call this the user-to-application chain. The response time experienced by users when they hit enter is dependent on multiple components that must all work seamlessly to deliver applications. By way of example, the data flow typically starts at the user device, traverses the local WiFi and last mile connection to the service provider, across the Internet and finally to the datacentre hosting the application server...and then return. Degradation of any single component in this user-to-application chain can seriously impact user experience.
Visibility tools need to be aware of all these components and have the ability to continually track and report on key metrics across the complete user-to-application chain. The ability to correlate data from different components is critical in identifying potential performance issues and maintaining user performance. For example, when diagnosing user performance complaints, the ability to correlate application response time, with DNS lookup times and WiFi quality is essential in being able to rapidly identify potential issues in the user application chain.
Byte25 take a holistic approach to network visibility to monitor all aspects of the user-to-application chain. By collecting and correlating data from different sources such as endpoint data, WiFi performance metrics, synthetic transactions data, combined with comprehensive deep packet inspection, SNMP and NetFlow monitoring, Byte25 can provide a complete visibility solution for reporting and diagnostics across the entire enterprise covering the complete user-to-application chain.
Ariana: What technologies/tools are most effective in delivering real-time traffic visibility?
David: There is no shortage of network visibility tools available in the market today. The problem is that most network visibility tools are very good at telling you what the problem isn’t, as opposed to what the problem actually is.
When users complain about poor application performance, most visibility tools can provide data on one component of the user-to-application chain. For example, SNMP tools can inspect raw bandwidth data to rule out network bandwidth issues, DPI tools may be able to identify the mix of traffic on the links and potentially even latency information – but in both cases, these tools are simply ruling out potential performance culprits as opposed to actually identifying root case.
In an attempt to resolve this constraint, organisations often find themselves implementing multiple point solutions to monitor various components of the network. Apart from the complexity and cost involved in supporting multiple visibility tools, the main issue with point solutions is that there is limited ability to correlate data from different sources pertaining to different components in the user-to-application chain.
Tools, such as Byte25, that combine monitoring of multiple components provide the most effective real time traffic visibility solution. Byte25 collects performance metrics from multiple sources including end point monitoring, WiFi quality, synthetic transactions, deep packet inspection, SNMP and network based intrusion detection to deliver holistic real-time traffic visibility.
To continue to provide visibility of today’s complex networks, visibility solutions need to monitor multiple components and allow for correlation to identify patterns or relationships that uncover the root cause of user performance issues.
That is, modern visibility tools need data sets that quickly and accurately identify exactly what the problem is, as opposed to simply alluding to what the problem isn’t.
David’s has 30 years of experience is software engineering specialising in the design and implementation of network performance monitoring products. As the founder and CTO of Byte25, he has spearheaded the company's journey towards becoming a pioneering force in the network observability arena. Throughout his career, David has successfully founded a number of companies from inception through to successful exit. David is currently responsible for product development and software engineering at Byte25 and has a customer focused approach to building products that are both simple to use and solve real world problems. He has extensive expertise in understanding the metrics and network conditions that effect end user experience and has successfully applied this knowledge to build industry leading monitoring solutions that meet the need of modern IT environments.
This interview is a part of The Fast Mode's Traffic Visibility segment, featuring leading networking, analytics and cybersecurity companies and their views on the importance of network intelligence and DPI for today's IP networks. A research report on this topic will be published in June 2024 - for more information, visit here.
