Scaling LiveWire in all Directions

1 Introduction

The modern enterprise network landscape is rapidly evolving, driven by factors such as the digital transformation, remote working, streaming, cloud services, IoT devices, and the increasing need for robust cybersecurity. And we would be remiss not to mention the growing increase in AI data like ChatGPT, Bard, and other AI systems coming on line at incredibly fast rate. As these networks become more complex, organizations require scalable and adaptable network monitoring and troubleshooting solutions to maintain optimal performance and security.?

In this article we will provide an in-depth analysis of LiveAction's LiveWire solution, focusing on its performance and multi-dimensional scalability. We will discuss how LiveWire can accommodate diverse network environments and requirements by offering a range of appliance and software deployment options. We also explore how the LiveWire solution can be deployed and managed at scale and integrated with LiveNX and ThreatEye.?

1.1 Background on LiveAction LiveWire?

LiveAction's LiveWire is an innovative high performance packet capture and analysis platform for organizations of all sizes. LiveWire is designed to address the challenges of today's complex networks, with a comprehensive suite of tools and features that enable IT administrators to effectively monitor, troubleshoot, and optimize their network infrastructure.?

2 LiveWire Deployment Options?

To accommodate the diverse network environments and requirements of modern organizations, LiveAction LiveWire offers a range of deployment options. These options ensure that the solution can be customized to best suit the specific needs of each organization, providing optimal visibility and management capabilities regardless of network topology or scale.?

2.1 Inline Appliances?

Inline appliances are physical devices placed directly in the network path to capture and analyze traffic in real-time. These appliances provide full visibility into network activity and are especially useful for monitoring critical network segments, such as data center or core network links. Inline LiveWire appliances can be deployed at strategic points in the network to ensure comprehensive monitoring and facilitate rapid troubleshooting of performance or security issues.?

LiveAction's inline appliance is called the LiveWire Edge. The LiveWire Edge is about the size of a cigar box. It is a solid state device with no moving parts. The Edge sports a 1TB SSD, and 1Gbps ports, 8 cores, and can capture at a sustained rate of 1Gbps all day everyday. At 1Gbps, the Edge can store packets for about 2 hours.

2.2 Cloud-based Solutions?

As organizations increasingly migrate their workloads and infrastructure to the cloud, LiveWire offers cloud-based deployment options to ensure seamless visibility and management across both on-premises and cloud environments. By deploying LiveWire in popular cloud platforms such as AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud, organizations can extend their network monitoring capabilities to cover cloud-based resources, gaining insights into application performance, network latency, and security events in the cloud.?

LiveWire Virtual is LiveAction solution for virtual and cloud based environments. In a virtual or cloud environment you have complete control over the resources like CPU, memory, and disk space. And with the LiveWire LiveFlow Turbo feature that matters, because LiveWire can load balance packets by flow over the cores to achieve the best performance generating LiveFlow for LiveNX. We will talk more about LiveNX and LiveFlow later.

2.3 Data Center Deployments?

Data centers are often the backbone of an organization's IT infrastructure, housing critical applications, storage, and network resources. LiveWire offers specialized deployment options tailored for data center environments, providing granular visibility into data center traffic and enabling IT teams to quickly identify and resolve issues that could impact application performance or availability. With LiveWire deployed in data centers, organizations can maintain optimal performance, ensure high availability, and proactively address potential bottlenecks or security risks.?

For small data centers, LiveAction offers the Core and PowerCore. The Core is a 1U appliance with 16T of disk space that can capture at a sustained rate of about 4Gbps and store around a day and a half of packets at that rate.

For larger data centers, LiveWire offers the best in class power house of an appliance known as the almighty PowerCore. The PowerCore is a 2U appliance, with 240T of disk space. The base unit can capture at a sustained rate of 60Gbps.

The PowerCore can also be extended with Extended Storage Units known as JBODs (just a bunch of disks). The JBODs are 2U appliances, and each JBOD adds another 240T to the PowerCore. With one JBOD, the PowerCore capture at a sustained rate of 100Gbps and store packets for about a day. With 8 JBODs the PowerCore can store up to 6.7T of data for around 18 days!

2.4 Customizing LiveWire for Specific Network Requirements?

In addition to the deployment options mentioned above, LiveWire can be customized to address unique network requirements or challenges. For example, organizations with remote branches or distributed networks can deploy LiveWire at the edge to monitor traffic between sites, ensuring consistent performance and security across the entire organization. Similarly, LiveWire can be configured to focus on specific applications or network segments, providing targeted insights that can help organizations optimize their network infrastructure and enhance the user experience.?

LiveAction LiveWire offers a wide range of deployment options to suit the diverse needs of modern organizations. Whether deployed as inline appliances, in the cloud, or within data centers, LiveWire can be tailored to meet specific network requirements, ensuring comprehensive monitoring and management across even the most complex network environments. By leveraging these flexible deployment options, organizations can maximize the value of their network monitoring solution and maintain optimal performance, security, and availability.?

3 Real-time Traffic Analysis and Metadata Generation?

One of the key features of LiveAction LiveWire is its ability to analyze network traffic in real-time and generate rich metadata, which provides valuable insights into network performance, security, and user experience. This real-time traffic analysis and metadata generation capability enables organizations to proactively identify and resolve issues before they impact the network or end-users, ensuring optimal network performance and reliability.?

3.1 LiveWire's Real-time Analytics Capabilities?

LiveWire's real-time traffic analysis capability involves deep packet inspection (DPI) and flow data analysis. DPI allows LiveWire to examine the content and header information of each packet traversing the network, providing granular visibility into application performance, user behavior, and potential security threats. In addition to DPI, LiveWire also analyzes flow data, which provides a high-level view of traffic patterns, trends, and resource utilization across the network.?

By combining DPI and flow data analysis, LiveWire can identify issues such as bandwidth hogs, unauthorized applications, or network anomalies that could indicate security breaches or performance bottlenecks. These real-time analytics capabilities empower IT teams to quickly detect and resolve issues, ensuring the overall health and stability of the network.?

3.2 Rich Metadata for Enhanced Network Visibility?

As LiveWire analyzes network traffic in real-time, it generates rich metadata that provides additional context and detail about network activity. This metadata includes information about applications, protocols, users, devices, and more, which can be used to create detailed reports, visualizations, and alerts.?

The rich metadata generated by LiveWire enables IT teams to gain a deeper understanding of their network environment and user behavior, allowing them to identify trends, pinpoint inefficiencies, and optimize resource allocation. Furthermore, this metadata can be leveraged for advanced security analytics, helping organizations detect and respond to potential threats or breaches more effectively.?

4 LiveNX Integration for a Comprehensive Network View?

Integrating LiveWire with LiveAction's LiveNX platform provides organizations with a powerful, unified solution for network monitoring and management. By combining LiveWire's real-time traffic analysis and metadata generation capabilities with LiveNX's advanced telemetry from routers, switches, and other network devices, IT teams can gain a comprehensive view of their entire network environment, enabling faster troubleshooting, more informed decision-making, and streamlined network operations.?

4.1 Combining LiveWire Data with Router and Switch Telemetry?

LiveNX offers advanced data collection and analysis capabilities for network devices, such as routers and switches. By integrating this telemetry with LiveWire's rich metadata, organizations can obtain a complete, end-to-end view of network activity and performance. This holistic perspective allows IT teams to quickly identify patterns, trends, and potential issues, making it easier to troubleshoot and optimize network performance.?

4.2 Enhanced Network Monitoring and Troubleshooting?

The integration of LiveWire and LiveNX offers a wealth of information about network performance, user experience, and security events. This comprehensive network view enables IT teams to proactively identify and address issues before they impact end-users or the overall network infrastructure. By combining these powerful monitoring and analysis capabilities, organizations can improve the efficiency and effectiveness of their network troubleshooting efforts, reducing downtime and ensuring a high level of service quality.?

4.3 Streamlining Network Operations with LiveNX?

A unified network monitoring and management solution, such as the integration of LiveWire and LiveNX, can significantly streamline network operations. IT teams can leverage a single platform to manage and monitor all aspects of their network environment, reducing the complexity and overhead associated with maintaining multiple, disparate tools. This consolidation of network monitoring and management capabilities helps organizations optimize their IT resources, enhance collaboration among team members, and improve overall operational efficiency.?

4.3 Customizing LiveWire to Meet Specific Network Requirements?

The flexibility of LiveWire's integration with third-party solutions allows organizations to tailor their network monitoring and management strategy to their specific needs. By leveraging the extensive capabilities of these solutions, IT teams can create custom reports, visualizations, and alerts that provide targeted insights into their unique network environment. This customization enables organizations to maximize the value of their network monitoring investment and ensure the optimal performance, security, and availability of their network infrastructure.?

In summary, extending LiveAction LiveWire with third-party solutions provides organizations with a flexible, customizable approach to network monitoring and management. By integrating LiveWire's real-time traffic analysis and metadata generation capabilities with a variety of network monitoring tools, organizations can gain a comprehensive, end-to-end view of their network environment, enabling them to proactively identify and address issues, optimize network performance, and maintain a secure and reliable network infrastructure.?

5 Load Balancing with Packet Brokers for Higher Performance Solutions?

Leveraging a packet broker to load balance packets by flow is another effective way to optimize the performance and scalability of LiveWire appliances in a network. By load balancing network traffic across multiple stacked LiveWire appliances, organizations can achieve higher performance and greater visibility into network activity, even in high-traffic environments.?

5.1 Packet Broker Integration?

Packet brokers play a crucial role in managing and distributing network traffic to various monitoring and security tools, including LiveWire appliances. By integrating a packet broker with LiveWire deployments, organizations can ensure that packets are load balanced by flow across multiple LiveWire appliances. This approach helps maintain an even distribution of network traffic, preventing overloading or underutilization of individual appliances, and ensuring that each LiveWire operates at optimal efficiency.?

5.2 Enhanced Performance and Scalability?

Load balancing packets by flow across multiple stacked LiveWire appliances significantly enhances the performance and scalability of the network monitoring solution. As network traffic increases or becomes more complex, organizations can simply add additional LiveWire appliances to the stack to maintain optimal visibility and analysis capabilities.?

This approach allows organizations to adapt their network monitoring solution to their evolving needs, ensuring that they can effectively handle the increasing demands of modern networks. By distributing traffic evenly across multiple LiveWire appliances, organizations can maintain high levels of network visibility, analytics, and security, even in high-traffic environments.?

5.3 Improved Network Monitoring and Troubleshooting?

Load balancing packets across stacked LiveWire appliances also improves the efficiency and effectiveness of network monitoring and troubleshooting efforts. With a more evenly distributed workload, each LiveWire appliance can analyze and process network traffic more effectively, allowing IT teams to quickly identify and address potential issues, bottlenecks, or security threats.?

This enhanced visibility and performance enable organizations to maintain a high level of network performance and security, ensuring the reliability and stability of their critical network infrastructure.?

6 Distributed Forensic Search and Multi-Segment Analysis?

As organizations deploy LiveWire appliances throughout their networks, they can take advantage of advanced features such as Distributed Forensic Search and Multi-Segment Analysis. These capabilities demonstrate the synergistic benefits of deploying multiple LiveWires and showcase how the return on investment (ROI) increases as the deployment grows.?

6.1 Distributed Forensic Search?

Distributed Forensic Search is a powerful feature that allows organizations to search across multiple LiveWire appliances simultaneously to quickly locate and investigate specific network events or anomalies. By aggregating and analyzing data from all deployed LiveWires, IT teams can obtain a comprehensive view of network activity, enabling them to identify patterns, trends, and potential issues more efficiently.?

This feature significantly reduces the time and effort required to investigate network incidents, improving the overall efficiency of network troubleshooting and incident response. As the deployment of LiveWires grows across an organization's network, the benefits of Distributed Forensic Search become even more pronounced, leading to an increased ROI.?

6.2 Multi-Segment Analysis?

Multi-Segment Analysis is another advanced feature that allows organizations to analyze and correlate network traffic data from multiple network segments, providing a holistic view of network performance and user experience. By combining data from different LiveWire appliances, IT teams can gain a more accurate understanding of end-to-end network performance and identify potential bottlenecks or issues that may impact user experience.?

This feature enables organizations to optimize their network infrastructure and resource allocation, ensuring consistent performance and a high-quality user experience across all network segments. As the number of LiveWire appliances deployed throughout the network increases, the benefits of Multi-Segment Analysis become even more significant, leading to a higher ROI and improved overall network performance.?

7 The need for scalable network monitoring and management?

In a world where networks are becoming increasingly large and complex, the ability to scale network monitoring and management solutions is paramount. Scalability ensures that the solution can handle the growing number of devices and traffic, while also adapting to the changing needs of the organization. As such, it is crucial for network monitoring and management solutions to be flexible, customizable, and able to integrate seamlessly with existing tools and infrastructure.?

In this article, we explore the multi-dimensional scalability of LiveAction's LiveWire solution. From centralized management through the Grid, to the diverse deployment options, we discuss how LiveWire accommodates the unique requirements of different network environments. Additionally, we examine LiveWire's real-time traffic analysis and metadata generation capabilities, along with its integration with LiveNX and other monitoring solutions, to provide a complete and holistic view of the network. By understanding the various ways in which LiveWire scales, organizations can better leverage its capabilities to maintain efficient, secure, and high-performing networks.?

7.1 Scaling and management of LiveWires with The Grid?

As organizations grow and expand their networks, managing an increasing number of LiveWire appliances and software deployments becomes a critical challenge. To address this, LiveAction provides the Grid, a cloud-hosted solution on Amazon Web Services (AWS), which enables centralized management of all LiveWire instances from a single pane of glass.?

7.2 Centralized management for LiveWire deployments?

The Grid offers a unified dashboard, allowing IT administrators to oversee their entire LiveWire infrastructure from one location. This centralized approach simplifies network management by providing a consistent, streamlined interface for monitoring, configuring, and troubleshooting LiveWire devices. By consolidating management tasks, the DMS helps organizations save time and resources while reducing the risk of human error.?

7.3 Individual and bulk device management?

The Grid provides powerful tools for managing LiveWire devices both individually and in bulk. Administrators can quickly configure and deploy new devices, apply software updates, and modify settings for multiple devices simultaneously. This bulk management capability is particularly useful for large-scale network environments where manual configuration of individual devices can be time-consuming and prone to errors. With the DMS, IT teams can efficiently manage their LiveWire infrastructure, ensuring consistent configurations and settings across the entire network.?

8.3 Benefits of a cloud-hosted service?

Hosting the Grid on AWS offers several advantages over traditional on-premises solutions. First, the cloud-based nature of the service ensures high availability and reliability, as AWS data centers are designed with multiple levels of redundancy and failover capabilities. This ensures that the Grid is always accessible, even in the event of hardware failures or other disruptions.?

Second, the cloud-hosted Grid offers superior scalability. As the number of LiveWire devices and the volume of network traffic grow, the Gridcan easily scale its resources to accommodate the increased demand, ensuring consistent performance and responsiveness. This scalability also extends to integrating new features and improvements, which can be rolled out seamlessly via the cloud infrastructure.?

Finally, the Grid leverages the robust security features of AWS, including encryption, access controls, and continuous monitoring. By hosting the Grid on AWS, organizations can be confident in the security and compliance of their network management solution.?

In summary, the Grid hosted in AWS enables centralized, efficient, and secure management of LiveWire appliances and software deployments, ensuring that organizations can effectively scale their network monitoring and management as they grow.?

9 Case Studies and Success Stories?

The scalability and flexibility of LiveAction LiveWire have proven valuable to organizations across various industries and network environments. In this section, we will explore a few case studies and success stories that demonstrate how LiveWire has helped organizations achieve significant improvements in network performance, security, and overall efficiency.?

9.1 Case Study 1: Large Financial Institution?

A large financial institution with a complex, distributed network infrastructure faced challenges in maintaining optimal network performance and security. By deploying LiveWire appliances in strategic locations throughout their network, including data centers, branch offices, and cloud environments, the institution gained comprehensive visibility into network traffic and user activity.?

The real-time traffic analysis and metadata generation capabilities of LiveWire, combined with the centralized management provided by the Device Management Service (DMS), enabled the organization to proactively identify and address performance bottlenecks, potential security threats, and bandwidth hogs. The integration with LiveNX further enhanced their network monitoring capabilities, resulting in faster troubleshooting, reduced downtime, and improved overall network performance and security.?

9.2 Case Study 2: Healthcare Provider?

A large healthcare provider with numerous clinics and hospitals faced the challenge of maintaining high-quality network performance and ensuring secure transmission of sensitive patient data. By deploying LiveWire appliances in both inline and cloud-based configurations, the healthcare provider gained granular visibility into network traffic across all locations.?

The real-time analytics provided by LiveWire enabled the IT team to quickly detect and address potential security breaches, ensuring the confidentiality and integrity of patient data. Additionally, the integration with third-party SIEM and log management solutions enhanced their ability to monitor and respond to security events, further strengthening their network security posture.?

9.3 Case Study 3: Manufacturing Company?

A global manufacturing company with multiple production facilities and a distributed workforce needed a scalable and efficient network monitoring solution to maintain optimal performance and security. By deploying LiveWire appliances in their data centers, production facilities, and remote sites, the company gained real-time visibility into network traffic and performance.?

The LiveWire metadata, combined with telemetry from routers and switches through LiveNX integration, provided the IT team with a comprehensive view of network activity, enabling them to identify and address potential issues before they impacted production. The scalability and flexibility of LiveWire, along with the centralized management provided by the DMS, allowed the company to adapt their network monitoring solution as their infrastructure and workforce grew.?

10 Conclusion?

LiveAction LiveWire has proven to be a highly scalable and flexible solution for network monitoring and management across diverse network environments and industries. By offering various deployment options, real-time traffic analysis, rich metadata generation, and seamless integration with LiveNX and third-party solutions, LiveWire provides organizations with a comprehensive, end-to-end view of their network infrastructure.?

The case studies and success stories discussed in this whitepaper demonstrate the significant improvements in network performance, security, and efficiency that can be achieved by leveraging LiveWire's capabilities. As network complexity continues to grow, the scalability and flexibility of LiveWire ensures that organizations can adapt their network monitoring and management strategies to meet the evolving needs of the organization.?

?