Untangle IT Complexity Through Wire Data

Making networks simpler, more manageable and increasing efficiency is of utmost importance in this world where traffic, especially from the cloud, is growing at a compound rate. If your network isn’t efficient, you can’t possibly use cloud or other services with any kind of performance. And if you don’t fully understand what is happening on that network, you can’t guarantee availability of critical applications.

Many tools try to solve these problems, but nearly all have a fairly superficial view of network traffic. To truly understand, you have to go deep, and this is the purview of wire data analysis, which will be covered during, “10 Ways Wire Data Can Help You Conquer IT Complexity” on Tues. December 3 at 2 p.m. EST.

Not only does wire data go deeper, because it encompasses the whole of your network traffic, it offers a simpler approach to performance tuning and network and application troubleshooting.

So what is wire data? Let’s let webinar sponsor ExtraHop take this one.

“Wire data is all L2-L7 communications between all systems, including full bi-directional transactional payloads,” ExtraHop says. Those familiar with the OSI 7-layer network model

Know that wire data encompasses all layers except the lowest physical layer.
 

“Information off the wire is the best source of cross-tier visibility and the basis for real-time IT operational intelligence. The information needed for operational intelligence has always existed on the wire, but previously was not available in real time or in a way that was easily understood,” the company continued. “The ExtraHop platform introduces revolutionary wire data analysis capabilities that make it possible—for the first time—to fully analyze the wealth of data that passes over the wire in real time and present it in a way that makes sense for any IT Operations professional.”

Alaska Airlines Taps Wire Data

Airlines reputations are made or broken by how much they can approach on-time performance. This is why Alaska Airlines went to ExtraHop to improve its efficiency by exploiting wire data.

“Given the airline’s operational scale, even a small increase in effectiveness would translate into substantial revenue increases and improvements in customer-impacting metrics, such as on-time flight performance. Despite Alaska Airlines’ industry-leading IT position, IT performance could be improved further,” ExtraHop said.

One element is making the airline’s Informix databases more efficient. “Prior to using the ExtraHop system, Alaska Airlines’ IT team had to be aware that a problem was occurring before they could intervene, and the IT team then would use native operating system tools to manually assess the health of the infrastructure running their Informix database servers. To obtain even more specific transaction-level data, they had to turn on database profiling, a prohibitive step to take in the production environment due to high performance overhead,” ExtraHop said.

With ExtraHop in hand, the airline can now view all its network tiers in an integrated way. The result is problems are spotted earlier with less admin time. And network and application performance are both improved.

Without ExtraHop, Alaska Airlines may never have gotten to the root of its wire data. “Wire data is the record of everything that is happening in your IT environment in real time. It provides an unmatched, in-depth view into the performance, availability, and security of your environment, including issues that you otherwise might not know about.

“Like anything of great value, wire data does not come easily. The sheer size and speed of all the data running through your IT environment on a constant basis makes wire data difficult to catch in its entirety. In just one day, a large organization can easily create petabytes of raw wire data in a number of application protocols and formats.”

The webinar event on Tuesday Dec. 3 will review the top ten ways to exploit wire data and reduce IT complexity. At the same time you’ll learn how ExtraHop partner T2 Systems harnesses wire data make its SaaS (News - Alert) service run faster and better. “You’ll walk away with a clearer understanding of the revolutionary wire data analysis capabilities that make it possible—for the first time—to present real-time wire data in a way that makes sense to all teams,” ExtraHop promised.