CA Technologies and Ixia deepened their existing partnership built on their monitoring and analytics capabilities to support Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI), SD-WAN, and cloud environments including Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform.

This builds on an existing agreement between the two companies that provides visibility across applications and workloads in traditional enterprise, cloud, or hybrid deployments. The new agreement will “resolve obfuscation, scale, and complexity hurdles (e.g. encapsulation, encryption, and lack of a traditional access to underlying network) introduced by newer dynamic architectures,” wrote Scott Westlake, vice president of business development at Keysight’s Ixia solutions group, in an email.

These newer architectures include Cisco ACI, SD-WAN, and public and private clouds. The joint offering enables a non-intrusive analysis of packet data across these "dynamic architectures."

What makes these environments — particularly Cisco ACI networks — so complex to monitor is that the technologies are often “difficult to scale, place high loads on production traffic, and can modify traffic, making it difficult to support the diverse monitoring needs of network, security, application, and server groups,” Westlake said.

The new integration enables such analysis by combining CA’s network operation and analytics products and Ixia’s network visibility products to create a joint network performance management and diagnostics technology. It is delivered as software, and it is provisioned with a mix of virtual and physical appliances or cloud workloads. The automation component is enabled via APIs.

Ixia technology collects granular packet data that can be fed into CA’s Digital Operational Intelligence platform, which uses machine learning to detect and resolve critical network issues.

The joint offering deploys Ixia network taps and network packet brokers (NPBs) and works to remove unnecessary packet data and packet headers before being transmitted across the network. This provides data filtering, aggregation, and packet slicing. These taps and NPBs can reduce 40 Gb/s traffic so that it can be easily processed by CA application delivery capabilities and CA’s packet collection component, according to the companies.

The data filtering automatically ensures that the right data goes to the right monitoring or security product to resolve network problems, faster. It can also filter traffic in public and private clouds to enhance visibility in these environments. This includes monitoring the three main public clouds: AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google.

According to Westlake this joint offering expands on metadata-level information by adding deep root cause analysis. “Dynamic filtering and automation reduce monitoring overhead while delivering all needed data for analysis,” he said.