Performance monitoring company Gigamon announced today that it is adding new capabilities to its FlowVUE monitoring platform. Using flow samples, Gigamon is able to send multiple copies of data to multiple tools, giving carriers a multi-dimensional view of their subscribers.

The massive amounts of traffic going through a provider’s network at a given time made it really difficult to analyze the data it needed to give customers the proper quality of service.

About three years ago, Gigamon co-designed the FlowVUE platform to help service providers scale down the amount of data received from traffic in their networks, enabling them to analyze the data they need, says Andy Huckridge director of service provider solutions with Gigamon. The smaller amount of data allows the providers to use the right monitoring tools it needs to analyze it.

However, until now, FlowVUE was only able to connect certain types of data with certain types of tools for analysis, limiting what providers could observe. Flow samples allow for multiple copies of the same data to be connected to an entire range of monitoring tools. This improves efficiency because providers are only accessing the tools they need with the right data they need.

Even with the scaled down amount of data, operators are able to see a subscriber’s location, device, or service they are using so operators can get a full view of the subscriber’s environment. This multi-dimensional view allows operators to pinpoint issues by correlating all of these data points, Huckridge says.

“The upside to the carrier is that they can get a better understanding of the subscriber and their traffic usage to tailor their services to higher value subscribers based on their usage,” Huckridge says. And from the subscriber’s perspective their quality of service is enhanced because the provider knows their networking habits.

There is also a security aspect to this new capability. Providers can now take any data and apply it to the same unified rail of security tools to get a quicker and deeper understanding of the traffic in a network, Huckridge claims.

A tool rail is a essentially a library of tools that operators can access from any location, and they are able to send whatever data they need to a particular tool, depending on what they want to accomplish. This allows operators to access tools from one place while only using what they need.