The growth in cloud-based applications that scale automatically using SDN has resulted in the increasing use of overlay networks, enabling multiple virtual networks to be built on top of a common underlying physical network.
As the numbers of endpoints have grown exponentially, manually configuring these overlay networks has become impossible, necessitating the use of dynamic overlay networks managed by orchestration platforms.
Overlay networks present a challenge for network monitoring as legacy monitoring at the underlying physical network layer would make visible all the overlay networks without the ability to monitor network conditions and SLAs for the overlay network. Further complicating matters, the overlay network may traverse multiple physical locations, connected over BGP links.
While it is possible to monitor at the endpoint, this is typically based on logs created within a VM or an active client and need to be configured for each client device, whereas monitoring traffic on the overlay network itself is agnostic to the application.
Using Cubro packet brokers, it is possible to monitor these complex network topologies. Using multiple functions such as filtering down to specific VXLAN tags and correlating traffic across BGP the Cubro solutions ensure that only required packets arrive at the monitoring systems and that duplicated traffic is removed.
Overlay network traffic maybe incorrectly deduplicated if identical addressing is used across multiple overlays
Standard deduplication is not sufficient either, as inner packet addressing may be identical within different overlay networks. Normal deduplication would use the packet header to falsely identify a duplicate even though it exists within a separate overlay.
Contact us today to enable visibility across your overlay network.