Gigamon Offloads NetFlow Processing from Network Infrastructure

More IT organizations than ever are relying on NetFlow to gather data about network traffic that can be analyzed in a way that improves overall application performance. The challenge is that collecting and analyzing that data usually comes at the expense of the overall performance of the network.

To address that issue, Gigamon today announced it is building an application that will generate and export NetFlow records from within the company’s Visibility Fabric network monitoring platform.

Gigamon Chief Strategy Officer Shehzad Merchant says offloading NetFlow processing to the Gigamon Visibility Fabric means that network infrastructure is no longer being taxed to process the overhead caused by NetFlow. Instead, servers running the Gigamon Visibility Fabric take care of that part of the required processing in a way that also provides applications with more granular insights into what is happening on the network.

The reason for this is that different classes of devices process NetFlow differently, which often leads to varying degrees of quality in terms of how NetFlow is implemented. Merchant says that moving NetFlow processing to the Gigamon Visibility Fabric provides a more consistent approach to generating quality NetFlow data.

Gigamon already supports a packet-based approach to analyzing network traffic. But with more application performance tools relying on NetFlow to analyze traffic, Merchant says a clear need has emerged to add support for NetFlow. But while NetFlow provides the ability to better understand what’s happening on the network, that doesn’t necessarily mean that organizations should have to pay a network performance penalty to gain access to it.