New Relic : A quickstart to long-lasting security with network intelligence and Gigamon

The invention of the radio telescope 80 years ago opened a new perspective into how we observed the heavens over millennia. We can now examine the universe day or night, through bad weather, through atmospheric noise, and even through intergalactic haze. Radio waves expanded the spectrum of what's observable.

In the world of software observability, hybrid-cloud network intelligence is now expanding metrics, events, logs, and traces (MELT) to a new universe of visibility. You can see how network intelligence enhances and deepens observability with the Gigamon quickstart in New Relic Instant Observability. Together Gigamon Cloud Suite and New Relic One provide a different layer of security, an overlapping webbing of observability and network intelligence.

An initial tendency for some teams migrating workloads to the cloud is to assume cloud service providers take care of network security. They think, "We don't have to do anything with the network because of our service-level agreement (SLA) for cloud infrastructure." But seasoned cloud adopters know there's tremendous value in collecting and mining network data for many use cases, especially security, where the "unknown unknowns" matter the most.

Network intelligence telemetry is composed of packets, flows, and metadata. Using deep packet inspection, Gigamon Cloud Suite makes it possible to extract any combination of more than 5,000 metadata attributes from hybrid cloud network traffic. You can import the traffic metadata into your tools using IPFIX and CEF formats-and JSON for New Relic One.

The following diagram shows that Gigamon gets the network traffic using test access points or terminal access points (TAPs), which are agents that run inside the virtual machine. Gigmon does deep-packet inspection and sends up to 5,000 network traffic metadata in JSON format to New Relic One, where you can view it in dashboards.