Cloud Monitoring for Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Providing Comprehensive AWS Cloud Visibility

With broad platform support, flexible pricing, and nearly unlimited scalability, Amazon Web Services (AWS) play a central role in the great cloud migration. Despite the undeniable benefits of cloud and hybrid cloud options, the risks can quickly outweigh the advantages unless services remain available and continue to perform optimally as they evolve. 

With customer satisfaction and brand reputation on the line, interested stakeholders in cloud-based service performance include everyone from business owners to development teams relying on shadow IT for cloud-based applications. Network engineers, cloud architects, NetOps teams, and DevOps engineers have all come to appreciate the importance of seamless AWS visibility. 

As cloud environments continue to evolve, traditional data center packet capture and flow analysis-based testing methods have developed in parallel to provide cloud-hosted risk mitigation and end-user experience insight. Cloud visibility is the key to establishing network and application assurance for the AWS environment that mirrors the on-premises data center experience. The VIAVI Observer Platform makes this migration easy.  

Rising to the AWS Visibility Challenges  

When services are delivered in the on-premises data center, infrastructure and network data sources are readily available. When adding cloud monitoring to the equation, visibility and access to data become more complicated. 

Flying blind in the cloud is not an option, so Observer allows access to packets, metadata, Enriched Flow, and AWS VPC Flow logs to establish an ultimate source of performance truth and insight. Comprehensive traffic visibility leads to accurate end-user experience insights and access to high-fidelity forensics, regardless of the location or hybrid cloud configuration.  

Armed with a simplified and unified AWS visibility solution, IT teams can reclaim efficiency lost to cloud complexity and focus on customer-centric metrics that include:  

• Mean Time to Innocence (MTTI) - Observer brings a deeper level of AWS visibility to quickly isolate the problem domain (client, server, application, or network). Fast MTTI is essential for determining which organization should own the problem. 

• Mean Time to Resolution (MTTR) - Once the problem domain is isolated, the fixing organization must have a clear indication of where and how to act to restore performance as quickly as possible. Degraded performance can have many potential causes, but the only net effect is decreased customer satisfaction that continues to build.  

• Performance-Based ROI - Measuring performance before and after a cloud migration effort is essential to understand the ROI achieved when moving to the cloud. The same types of measurements and analysis should also be used to make future capacity planning decisions.   

• End User Experience - EUE monitoring is used to measure the quality of experience delivered to your end users. AWS visibility is used to quantify performance on a numeric scale and establish logical response thresholds.

  

VIAVI Observer Bridges the Gap

The Observer Platform brings enhanced, multi-faceted visibility to on-premises, AWS, and hybrid IT environments. Efficient workflows and intuitive dashboards fueled by three-dimensional data sources help to satisfy business goals while effectively overcoming IT challenges. The value of the Observer platform truly exceeds the sum of its parts when it comes to AWS visibility.

• Observer APEX - The centerpiece of the Observer platform is also the industry’s first performance monitoring solution to generate an EUE score for every client/server flow. Flexible dashboards support AWS problem identification and root cause analysis based on all available data sources. 

• Observer GigaStor - The industry-leading packet capture, analysis, and storage solution is now available as a virtual appliance for the AWS environment. Full packet capture and metadata-only options provide alternatives based on storage and cost constraints.  
• Observer GigaFlow - Enriched flow records integrate network, infrastructure, and user data into a single record carrying in-depth application and traffic information. GigaFlow natively accepts VPC Flow Logs to provide user-focused insights from the AWS environment.  

Observer APEX, GigaStor, and GigaFlow can all be deployed in the cloud, on-premises or as a combination and are ALL available within AWS Marketplace. This flexibility allows for an optimized trade-off between network visibility and cost.

AWS Visibility With VIAVI

VIAVI has advanced network performance monitoring technologies for more than three decades. The seamless addition of cloud-based data sources is simply the latest chapter in our story. A focus on end-user experience scoring to determine problem domain, severity, impact, and root cause with pinpoint accuracy continues to be our hallmark. 

Throughout the journey, the VIAVI value when it comes to AWS visibility has been underpinned by a three-dimensional approach to network monitoring that simultaneously optimizes:

• Location of monitoring components - Flexibility and portability are the keys to meeting the unique challenges of data center, AWS, hybrid, and public cloud configurations.

• Scope of deployment - The scope, footprint, and cost of each solution is also customizable with scalable test products provided through perpetual or subscription-based pricing models.

Diversity of data sources: The insights provided through GigaFlow and GigaStor are both cumulative and complimentary. Flexibility and customization per environment is key.