LiveAction today released an update to its network monitoring platform, LiveNX, that combines flow data with packet capture and analysis to create a unified service. LiveAction integrated packet-capture and analysis technology from Savvius, which it acquired in June, to build the network performance management and diagnostics platform.

The platform will integrate a number of data sources including flow, packet, simple network management protocol (SNMP), and API data.

According to Darren Kimura, LiveAction’s vice chairman and chief strategy officer, it combines a number of things its customers wanted. Namely, “Having an all-in-one platform that eliminates the need for disparate tools, reduces costs, and, most importantly, improves productivity.”

When LiveAction first acquired Savvius, Kimura said it would fill in the places that LiveAction didn’t have visibility. This included branches that have no flow data and data centers. “We now have complete east to west with north to south visibility,” he said at that time. The platform launch today is a result of this strategy.

With the release, LiveNX relies on a new appliance, LiveWire, to capture and convert real-time packet data. LiveWire feeds this data into the visualization engine of the new unified platform.

The combined capabilities of LiveNX and LiveWire also expands its reach to multi-fabric locations including branch locations, WANs and SD-WANs, data centers, multi-cloud environments, application classification, and more. These environments are what the company refers to as “dark environments.”

Traditional network monitoring tools aren’t equipped to handle these environments as many routers, switches, and network elements don’t export flow data, said Kimura. The “LiveWire appliance can be deployed in these locations next to the network device to produce full packet capture, packet write-to-disk, and deep packet inspection,” Kimura explained. The reason flow data is so important is it includes performance monitoring data and application identification data.

Among the updates, the company added support for Cisco’s Viptela-based SD-WAN routers and new visualizations for Cisco Application Visibility and Control reports. This provides an added layer of visualizations into Cisco’s SD-WAN. “These visualizations enhance existing tools such as SD-WAN monitoring by taking the data, statistics, and key performance indicators from those products and creates simple and easy-to-understand data visualizations. This improves the quality and speed of decision making,” Kimura said.

It also integrated capabilities from Savvius’ software for packet analysis, Omnipeek. Omnipeek captures and analyzes both wire and wireless data, offers peer mapping, multi-segment analysis, and new alerts for diagnosis. It is particularly helpful for monitoring and diagnosing voice-over IP (VoIP) and point-of-sale (POS) systems.

Already this year, LiveAction released a server appliance for its LiveNX monitoring platform. It relied on Savvius’ expertise in hardware for packet capture and monitoring to build the appliance. Going forward, LiveAction is also looking to integrated Savvius artificial intelligence (AI)/machine learning (ML) capabilities for flow into its own networking AI/ML tools in LiveNX.