Software testing and visibility company Ixia added more public clouds to its visibility platform CloudLens to include support for Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, IBM Bluemix, and Alibaba Cloud, in addition to its existing support for Amazon Web Services (AWS).

CloudLens is an umbrella term for Ixia’s virtual visibility components that let users specify what kind of traffic they want to analyze across multiple clouds. Traffic is then sent to validated third-party monitoring tools to be further inspected.

Ixia has integrated its platform with monitoring and security tools from companies like CA Technologies, Dynatrace, Protectwise, and RSA, said Scott Register, VP of security products at Ixia.

Ixia’s goal was to connect users that have a multi-cloud strategy to a platform where they can manage all of their data and direct traffic to specific monitoring tools. Additionally, if customers want to spin up additional tools, Ixia will recognize the change and redirect traffic accordingly.

“Our customers want to use multiple clouds for different things, and we want to support users in this way and not lock them in,” Register said. “We can move data and resources from one cloud to another. While a user’s tools might live in AWS, their data could be in Azure, and our job is to securely centralize them.”

Instead of relying on a virtual tap to grab data coming from an on-premises virtual machine (VM), Ixia uses the metadata in public cloud environments. The ability to deploy CloudLens in different cloud environments depends upon the metadata in that particular public cloud provider rather than relying on cloud-specific things like application programming interfaces (APIs).

Before Ixia announced extended CloudLens’ capabilities to public cloud, the platform was used for private cloud deployments like VMware or OpenStack. The private version and the public version are rarely used together. The most common hybrid deployments are typically used to help with a public cloud migration for a short period of time rather than a mixed long-term deployment, Register said.