The solution collects data from hardware and software sensors and then analyzes the information using advanced Big Data analytics (machine learning techniques), thus facilitating various critical operations in data centers such as policy compliance, application analysis, or the evolution towards a whitelist security model.
With Cisco Tetration Analytics, organizations can:
• Discover which applications depend on others across the data center and in the cloud;
• Take a proactive rather than reactive approach: make informed operational decisions and validate the impact of policy changes before implementing them;
• Search through billions of flows in less than a second using Tetration's search engine and user interface;
• Continuously monitor application behavior and quickly identify any deviations in communication patterns.
Tetration is designed to help you gain complete and ubiquitous visibility across the data center, either by using software sensors on the server that require very little computing power, hardware sensors on the network that monitor metadata packet by packet, or both combined for the most advanced solution.
By performing advanced real-time analytics and delivering processed data with easy-to-understand visuals, Tetration provides critical information for data center operations, including application visibility, automated whitelist policy recommendations, policy simulation and impact analysis, regulatory compliance management, and network flow analysis.
In this way, Tetration is like a “time machine” for the data center, helping organizations understand what has happened in the past, see what is happening in the present in real time, and preview what could happen in the future:
• Simulate a change before implementing it to understand the impact on applications and make informed operational decisions;
• Validate policy changes that have already been applied and are working at full capacity;
• Perform historical and real-time policy simulations – reproducing what happened on the network at any point in time thanks to its large long-term storage capacity.
Software sensors are installed on servers, whether virtual machines or physical hardware. In its initial version, Tetration supports Linux and Windows host servers for software sensors, while hardware sensors are integrated into the ASICs of Cisco Nexus 9200-X and Nexus 9300-EX switches to collect data flows from all ports at the line level. A single Tetration appliance can monitor up to one million unique flows per second. Both software and hardware sensors communicate flow data to the Tetration Analytics platform in real time. The platform can be deployed in any data center equipped with any type of servers and network switches.
The Tetration platform is a one-touch appliance: the servers and switches are pre-wired and the software is pre-installed. Setup is simple: just answer a few data center-related questions to configure the cluster, and no special Big Data expertise is required to deploy or manage Tetration.
