Enhancing NETSCOUT Visibility Without Borders With AWS Gateway Load Balancer Endpoint as a Target
A recent IDC report noted that 95% of organizations are implementing a digital-first strategy, and the cloud is central to this strategy. Accelerating business agility depends on efficient cloud migration and continuously developing and deploying new services and modernizing applications with confidence. Doing it right means assuring a first-class user and customer experience. Enterprises therefore face the challenge of faster time-to-value while efficiently managing a geographically distributed hybrid architecture comprised of on-premises environments and cloud deployments.
In a digital-first and hyperconnected environment, enterprises seek to establish end-through-end visibility from a single pane of glass. This visibility has to offer actionable intelligence on application performance, user experience, and cyberthreats that enterprises are facing across the extended attack surface of the hybrid architecture.
As an AWS Public Sector Partner, with both AWS Networking Competency and AWS Migration and Modernization Software Competency designations, NETSCOUT helps organizations gain the end-through-end visibility and actionable intelligence they need to migrate services to AWS and assure their performance and security in a hybrid architecture.
NETSCOUT is accomplishing this by capturing packet data traversing the cloud environment and performing simultaneous deep-packet inspection and real-time analysis. NETSCOUT’s vSTREAM virtual appliance monitors service-critical traffic running within cloud infrastructures and generates Smart Data at its point of collection. This Smart Data delivers a comprehensive view into the performance characteristics of all infrastructure and application components and their dependencies. For this reason, it is important to develop a packet acquisition strategy that relies on Smart Data generated by processing and analyzing packet data across the hybrid architecture, including on-premises environments, and in the cloud. This is the ultimate source of truth.
AWS recently announced the ability to designate an AWS Gateway Load Balancer (GWLB) Endpoint as a target for VPC Traffic Mirroring, enabling customers to mirror traffic from multiple EC2 ENIs across different subnets, VPCs, and even accounts to a group of NETSCOUT vSTREAM appliances deployed behind an AWS GWLB. This functionality, combined with the NETSCOUT packet acquisition architecture, simplifies and reduces operational expenses in AWS by allowing the targeting of GWLB endpoints in any VPC and any AWS account, for example in a management VPC. Such aggregation of mirrored traffic is very efficient and can scale across global and multi-tenant AWS deployments. Furthermore, a TGW is not required to route the traffic from the GWLB endpoints to the GWLB, which saves cost and simplifies the deployment architecture.
NETSCOUT’s highly scalable and operationally efficient solution enhances the scope of end-through-end visibility in the hybrid architecture. The combination of vSTREAM and the ability to use GWLB Endpoints simplifies packet acquisition from a variety of vantage points. These comprise both North/South (N/S) traffic traversing from the AWS network to on-premises datacenters, as well East/West (E/W) traffic, both between VPCs within AWS, and within a VPC between different EC2 instances.
Gateway Load Balancer Endpoint as Target Enhances Visibility Delivered by Cybersecurity and Performance Solutions From NETSCOUT
NETSCOUT Visibility Without Borders significantly improves the end-user experience and corporate security posture and accelerates the migration of workloads to AWS. By monitoring the service performance and cyberthreats across on-premises environments and AWS deployments, NETSCOUT can help significantly reduce the Mean-Time-To-Resolve (MTTR) of service performance issues, as well as mitigate cyberthreats. As a result, enterprise customers gain the confidence to innovate and accelerate the migration of on-premises workloads to AWS to achieve the business agility necessary to remain competitive in a digital-first-driven economy.