Re: Data Center Network Monitoring with TAPs

[Kristian Francisco <kristian.j.f () gmail com>]

I'm designing the first phase of a datacenter network monitoring project
for my company. We are starting with SPAN at access layer and plan to
control traffic volume using filtering, slicing, de-dupe, etc. There are
instances when we need to do capacity/delay analysis on L2 traffic and
Ixia, APCON, Emulex etc. are coming out with flow generators for SPAN/TAP
traffic.

We may decide to go with TAP in the future as we found a vendor that was
willing to implement functionality to allow us to offload flow generation
from our access/distribution/core devices by creating templates based on
the source device/interface. In essence, to our monitoring tools, netflow
traffic will seem as if it is coming from the real device.

Best Regards,

Kristian J. Francisco

On Mon, Jun 22, 2015 at 9:44 AM, Rafael Possamai <rafael () gav ufsc br> wrote:

> Here's a recent forum thread that discussed the same exact topic. You might
> find some insight:
>
> http://www.reddit.com/r/networking/comments/3aip3p/data_center_network_monitoring/
>
>
> On Sat, Jun 20, 2015 at 11:06 AM, Mitch Howards <hbf9121 () hotmail com>
> wrote:
>
> > Hello All,
> >
> > Was wondering what folks are using to monitor traffic
> >  on their networks. Looking into Ixia and APCON devices for dedup and
> > other filtering features as well as passive fiber TAPs to capture the
> > traffic.
> >
> > How are folks handling TAP'ing large data center
> > networks? TAPs at the "distribution layer" would be the best fit for my
> > network but that would require a ton of passive fiber TAPs for the
> > incoming fibers to the distribution switches. The end goal is to not
> > only capture the north-south traffic on the network but also east-west
> > traffic. It seems more efficient to just use SPANs but there are many
> > limitations using SPANs.
> >
> > Thanks in advance for any suggestions.
> >
> > Mitch