Expanding the Capabilities of Gigamon Hawk, the Deep Observability Pipeline with GigaVUE 5.16

At Gigamon, we are pleased to announce the general availability of GigaVUE^® 5.16 software that catapults the capabilities of Gigamon Hawk, the Deep Observability Pipeline. Packed with features, this release extends innovations in cloud, core, application intelligence, SSL/TLS decryption, GigaVUE-FM fabric manager, and mobility. This software is now available for download and accelerates innovation across your hybrid cloud.

Key updates and features of this release include:

Cloud Enhancements

The GigaVUE Cloud Suite™ delivers a cloud-based visibility and analytics solution that eliminates network blind spots as you move workloads to the cloud, significantly reducing security and noncompliance risks and helping remediate performance issues. This allows it to provide consistent visibility into data in motion across hybrid cloud environments, such as AWS, Azure, Kubernetes, Nutanix, OpenStack, and VMware.

This release adds:

• Support for cloud monitoring health. This feature allows you to monitor the configuration health status of the entire monitoring session across your hybrid cloud deployments and the individual fabric components for which the monitoring session is configured. This provides increased effectiveness of cloud network traffic handling via improved troubleshooting and usability.

• Support for multiple accounts/subscriptions in a single deployment in AWS or Azure. You can now monitor multiple AWS accounts or Azure subscriptions/tenants in a monitoring domain, where observability nodes are shared among multiple subscriptions or accounts. This enables you to reduce cost by having multiple accounts in a single public cloud deployment.

Core Enhancements                                                                          

This release adds significant enhancements across the GigaVUE TA Series of visibility nodes that aggregate traffic from SPAN ports and network TAP devices installed across the network, giving a pervasive view into information in motion.

• Support for logical bypass on GigaVUE-TA25. We have added flexible inline bypass support for TA25, which enables traffic forwarding and tool health monitoring for inline security appliances.
• Support for a new “E-tag” clustering method, including clustering with GigaVUE-TA400. You can now cluster TA400 with other GigaVUE TA and HC series products, even across remote connections. This adds broader, more flexible clustering for stacking use cases with 100Mb to 400Gb network links and tool ports.

Application Intelligence Enhancements

Application Intelligence visualizes all applications on your network and forwards only relevant application traffic for greater tool efficiency. Application Metadata Intelligence (AMI), a component of the Application Intelligence, uses critical metadata attributes to provide the deep application visibility needed to rapidly pinpoint performance bottlenecks, quality issues, and potential network security risks.

This release further enhances AMI capabilities to improve usability, security, and performance monitoring of cellular mobile subscriber networks with the addition of:

• TEID export on Gen 3 GigaSMART™. This supports metadata export for GTP traffic with tunnel identifiers, improving the ability to correlate GTP tunneled traffic flows from AMI metadata. It is now available on third-generation (Gen 3) GigaSMART for GigaVUE-HC1, Gen 3 GigaSMART for GigaVUE- HC3, and on GigaVUE V Series.
• Option to disable multi-collect mode for IPFIX. This allows tools that support only single-value attributes to ingest AMI metadata using the IPFIX format.
• Use of C-tag for GTP traffic distribution. This traffic distribution enhancement delivers up to 60 percent performance improvement in GTP metadata generation.

SSL/TLS Decryption Enhancements

We have added support for passive out-of-band SSL/TLS decryption to the Gen 3 module on GigaVUE-HC3, with a significant performance boost over its respective Gen 2 GigaSMART counterpart. This has increased Gen 3 passive SSL decryption performance by up to 63 percent more than Gen 2 GigaSMART.

Fabric Manager Enhancements

This launch improves the overall GigaVUE-FM fabric manager (FM) user experience and troubleshooting to further scale up monitoring operations and gain better insight into its usage.

The following enhancements are integrated into FM:

Packet capture (PCAP) – PCAP captures can now be initiated and configured directly from the FM GUI. This enables you to capture targeted traffic on specific ports into PCAP files and download the PCAP files without needing to use the local CLI.

Alarm handling – Alarms are now configured with hyperlinks to the source that triggered the alarm, along with new additions to alarm notifications. This allows you to quickly get to the root problem, which speeds up troubleshooting and reduces MTTR.

Fabric Health Analytics (FHA) – Fabric Asset Inventory has been added to FHA, along with relevant reports. Additionally, new Fabric Health dashboards include CPU, memory, and storage disk usage. This allows you to manage inventory more easily and analyze new trends and issues in your visibility fabric.

Mobility Enhancements

We have added support for JSON export of GTP-C on GigaVUE-HC3 Gen 2 GigaSMART, which allows the GTP correlation engine to export records for each subscriber session, derived from GTP-C data, in a streaming JSON format. This allows your tools to ingest metadata for use cases around subscriber analytics and network security.

Learn More

To summarize, this release provides a substantial expansion of feature support incorporating forward-looking clustering techniques, including for 400G networks. We have significantly pushed the performance boundaries to provide leading passive SSL/TLS decryption performance. This launch has continued to deliver improvements within GigaVUE-FM, setting it apart from other visibility fabric managers and further extending its visibility fabric leadership in public and private cloud with enhancements for AWS, Azure, and VMware.

You can learn more about this exciting release in the Gigamon Community, by reaching out to your local Gigamon representative, or by contacting us.