Ten Questions in Regards to a Network TAP Deliver Complete End-to-End Network Visibility

By Ashok Bindra, TMCnet Contributor

As networks get complex and data traffic explodes, monitoring the traffic across the network is becoming challenging. According to VSS Monitoring (News - Alert), a supplier of distributed traffic capture systems and network TAPs, end-to-end network visibility can be achieved for large networks by understanding how the copy of traffic captured gets to your monitoring tools.

To help customers better understand the traffic capture tools in their respective networks, the company has generated a white paper that provides a guide to the realities of large-scale traffic capture. In this paper, VSS Monitoring is highlighting ten key questions that IT managers and administrators must ask to ensure that vendors are delivering traffic capture solutions that provide complete enhanced visibility for the centralized monitoring of larger networks.

These vital questions include:

• Are your Gigabit copper taps failsafe?
• Can users interconnect your taps in any topology, including full mesh? Can they connect them over a WAN?  
• Do your taps provide session-aware load balancing of monitor port traffic? Is the load balancing automatic? What happens if a link is lost?
• How many10 Gbps taps do you offer? What is their range of port densities?
• Is there a GUI for every operation of the tap?
• Do your traffic capture solutions support inline as well as SPAN port capture?
• Do your taps have time and port sampling at the network ingress, before they groom traffic?
• Do you have local support in my geographic region?
• What high-value traffic capture technology have you invented, and what does it deliver?
• Do your traffic capture products interoperate as one integrated system?

In this paper, VSS answers all the questions satisfactorily to give customers a dose of confidence that its distributed traffic capture system can provide unrestricted visibility.

“It is the only solution that gives you the flexibility seeing what you want, whenever you need to see it, in real-time at the packet level,” according to the paper.

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(source: http://network-tap.tmcnet.com/topics/network-tap/articles/298883-ten-questions-regards-a-network-tap-deliver-complete.htm)