Performance monitoring vendor ExtraHop and Cisco partnered to boost the analytics capabilities of Tetration, Cisco’s data center analytics platform.

A year ago, Cisco touted Tetration as a means to monitor everything in the data center. However, it's building a new set of use cases for customers.

Tetration has been on the market for about a year and was built to function as a policy enforcer and security engine, said Isaac Roybal, director of product marketing at ExtraHop. However, by integrating with ExtraHop, Cisco is adding an additional layer of context with application-layer visibility, revealing the specific activity behind abnormal traffic patterns for even more targeted policy enforcement.

“What makes us different is that we use the network as a data source itself,” said Roybal. “Competitors are using information to gauge the flows of traffic in the network at a high level, but we take it a step further by pulling the content out of the pipe and taking all of the packets to extract details from the traffic.”

ExtraHop integrates with Tetration using an application programming interface (API) and collects metrics off its host, Roybal explained. ExtraHop’s platform provides its users with multiple security bundles to run on Tetration spanning different areas of security like ransomware, certificates, firewalls, and suspicious logins. ExtraHop collects the data from these security policies, which Tetration enforces.

In January, Cisco acquired application performance monitoring startup AppDynamics for $3.7 billion, so it’s curious why it wouldn’t be using AppDynamics’ technology for application-level analytics. But Roybal said AppDynamics provides detail into application performance and transactions related to the application.ExtraHop delivers visibility into externalities not directly linked to the application’s delivery chain that can affect its performance  such as large file share traffic bogging down a server hosting the application's core database.

AppDynamics, meanwhile, has partnered with ExtraHop on multiple deals to complement its technology with a higher level perspective.

It’s also worth noting that analytics company Corvil is integrating its technology with Tetration.

Corvil's analytics provide users with a deeper view into communications content, indicators of compromise, devices, services, application dependencies, transaction flows, and user activities.

The data is meant to help customers understand what kinds of security policies and orchestration to implement on Tetration.