Ixia Updates CloudLens for Public Cloud Visibility

Wyatt CarlsonApril 4, 2017
7:02 am PT

Software testing and visibility company Ixia announced today that it is extending the capabilities of its CloudLens products from on-premises to the public cloud.

CloudLens is an umbrella term that Ixia uses for all of its virtual visibility products. The company has been offering CloudLens Private for about four years but that product was only for on-premises infrastructures. The new public cloud version is called CloudLens Public.

CloudLens Public does the same thing as the private version but has a different architecture. CloudLens Public lets users go into a network and grab certain types of traffic that can be specified by the users. Once the desired traffic is received from the network, it is sent to third-party monitoring tools to be inspected.

The types of traffic that is being pulled typically starts with packet data, but CloudLens can also grab raw network traffic, net flow, or endpoint data and can apply additional processing, said Scott Register, vice president of security products at Ixia.

“One of the things that’s holding people back from cloud deployments is they’re not really sure how to deal with visibility in the public cloud where you don’t own the infrastructure,” Register said.

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.

While the core technology and workflows remains the same, one key differentiator is the ability to extract specific traffic by using certain monitoring tools.

CloudLens is currently available for Amazon Web Services (AWS) and will soon be available for Microsoft Azure, Register said. He also said the company is working with other major public clouds as well.

Ixia got its start in 1997 doing hardware and software testing, but through acquisitions like BreakingPoint, Anue Systems, and NetOptics, the company has made its way into developing application performance monitoring (APM) and network performance monitoring (NPM) products.