Data Center Network Monitoring with TAPs

[mel at beckman.org (Mel Beckman)]

Ultimately this is one of the things that SDN schemes such as OpenFlow bring a data center for free. Distributed flow statistics collection through OenFlow's extensible infrastructure gives you a huge range of reporting and analysis capabilities, with no taps needed. Every network port is in essence a tap.

Here's an interesting paper on one open source OF tool:

https://www.nas.ewi.tudelft.nl/people/Fernando/papers/MonitoringOpenFlow.pdf

 -mel beckman

> On Jun 21, 2015, at 9:50 PM, Mitch Howards <hbf9121 at hotmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Hello All, 
> 
> Was wondering what folks are using to monitor traffic
> on their networks. Looking into Ixia and APCON devices for dedup and 
> other filtering features as well as passive fiber TAPs to capture the 
> traffic. 
> 
> How are folks handling TAP'ing large data center 
> networks? TAPs at the "distribution layer" would be the best fit for my 
> network but that would require a ton of passive fiber TAPs for the 
> incoming fibers to the distribution switches. The end goal is to not 
> only capture the north-south traffic on the network but also east-west 
> traffic. It seems more efficient to just use SPANs but there are many 
> limitations using SPANs. 
> 
> Thanks in advance for any suggestions.
> 
> Mitch