VIAVI Solutions

Designed as an integrated offering, the Observer Platform provides visibility into critical Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) through pre-defined workflows from high-level dashboards to service anomaly root cause. It allows IT teams to satisfy business goals and overcome challenges across the entire IT enterprise life cycle whether deploying new technologies, managing current resources, solving service anomalies, or optimising IT asset usage.

The VIAVI Observer Platform offers real-time visibility into network traffic, allowing IT teams to monitor performance metrics, application behaviour, and user activity as it happens. By capturing packets at various points within the network, Observer provides granular insights into traffic patterns, allowing for accurate analysis and troubleshooting of performance issues. Most if not all of analysis will be done working from Apex where the metadata is stored.

Observer Apex, the intuitive user interface, utilises a patented, machine learning driven End-User Experience (EUE) Scoring system that offers real-time insights into the performance of the overall IT environment. This feature enables IT teams to effectively link network activity with the actual impact on users, facilitating immediate understanding and response to network, client server and application issues. Observer Apex provides global IT service health and status awareness while, at the same time, integrating the various aspects of network performance management.

Observer provides a wide set of features for robust monitoring and troubleshooting in one platform. This includes UC Call Visualisation to trace call paths and pinpoint issues, deeper End-User Experience (EUE) Scoring for effective prioritisation of network problems, and Certificate Analysis for proactive security against non-compliant or expiring certificates. Additionally, through Deep Packet Inspection (DPI), Observer is able to recognise 4,300+ business and non-business applications/protocols. It also provides seamless visibility in Azure and AWS environments, facilitating efficient management across hybrid and multi-vendor setups. All this is accessible through a single user-interface.

While Observer’s primary use model is built around the identification and resolution of performance issues, the captured packet stores are useful for security teams who need to perform forensic-level analysis of suspicious or malicious traffic, or need to document what was accessed and exfiltrated. Also, cert analysis is useful for users focused on ensuring compliance with corporate policies and best practices. Observer is designed to scale seamlessly to meet the needs of organisations of all sizes and industries. Whether it’s a medium-sized business with a small number of locations or a large enterprise with a global network footprint, Observer can accommodate diverse deployment scenarios that allow cost-effective packet capture and analysis right down to individual branch level and scale to handle increasing data volumes and network complexity across cloud and on-premises.

In particular, Observer is closely integrated into Amazon Web Services (AWS) public cloud. Observer Apex, GigaStor, and GigaFlow can all be deployed in the cloud, on-premises or as a combination and are ALL available within AWS Marketplace. This flexibility allows for an optimised trade-off between network visibility and cost. For companies that have invested in Microsoft Azure, Observer can also ingest and analyse NSG flow logs.

Finally, security is a top priority for organisations in today’s threat landscape. The VIAVI Observer Platform includes robust security monitoring capabilities, with a particular emphasis on Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM). This is important enough for Bloor to review the security capabilities of Observer Sentry in a separate InBrief report.

In an increasingly digital-first world the performance of customer facing applications can make the difference between business success and failure. Downtime and poor response times on applications can have a direct impact on the bottom line. Fifteen years ago, Amazon was already showing that every 100ms of latency cost them 1% in sales, while Google found an extra 0.5 seconds in search page generation time dropped traffic by 20%. They have spent a huge amount of time and money to ensure they understand exactly how their infrastructure performs….and their business flourishes. All businesses need that same sort of capability (NPMD) solution that is ideal for maintaining peak performance of all IT services.

As infrastructures grow increasingly complex, spanning on-premises and cloud data centres with diverse compute, network, and storage components from various vendors, it has become more challenging to understand and correlate the impact of events in a timely and cost-effective manner. When asked about what he liked best about Observer, the Manager of Network Engineering, at a very large Healthcare and Biotech company said it was “VIAVI Solutions ability to roll-up performance metrics and metadata to a tool like Apex but still providing ability to get at the underlying packets.” He also stated that the value or “bang for the buck is outstanding.”

The bottom line

In today’s digital age, where connectivity is essential for business success, organisations need robust network performance management solutions like the VIAVI Observer Platform to ensure the reliability, security, and efficiency of their network infrastructure. Whether it’s optimising application performance, detecting security threats, or ensuring compliance with regulatory requirements, Bloor believes that VIAVI equips organisations with the tools they need to succeed in today’s complex IT landscape.

Fig 02 - VIAVI Observer Sentry

Observer Sentry provides software-as-a-service (SaaS) based threat exposure management with traffic insights. It provides attack path visualisation enabling organisations to see their AWS environment from the perspective of attackers. Sentry discovers and combines internal attack paths with focused external attack surface scanning to identify unintended high-risk exposures. Displayed in intuitive graphs, Sentry analyses the business impact of high-risk exposures, helping organisations prioritise remediation activities.

The latest addition to Observer Sentry is its traffic insights capabilities. Traffic insights goes beyond identifying potential exposures, providing the ability to determine if an exposed resource has been compromised or an unpatched vulnerability has been exploited. With these additional capabilities, Sentry is now able to move beyond identifying what could happen to show what is actually happening. Through the integration of traffic data provided by AWS VPC Flow Logs, Sentry users gain visibility into inbound and outbound connection attempts and established connections by port and protocol along with the volume of data associated with a connection. Through integration with VIAVI Observer Apex users can perform a detailed forensic traffic analysis of any conversations of interest or concern.

The combination of threat exposure analysis and traffic insights enables a deeper understanding into high-risk exposures, proactive identification, prioritisation and remediation of threats.

VIAVI Observer Sentry is optimised to support business goals and improve overall cloud security posture by reducing the attack surface. It identifies security exposures, reveals whether bad actors have compromised exposed resources or exploited known vulnerabilities, and helps to prioritise most critical risks for quick remediation. VIAVI streamlines complex data into clarity, delivering actionable insights with fewer metrics. It allows organisations to identify, prioritise, and remediate risks with a proactive approach for protecting their cloud environments.

It is designed for use by DevOps, SecOps and cloud architects to provide visibility into the critical risks they face in the dynamic AWS environment in which they work.

VIAVI Observer Sentry is designed to provide maximum security with minimal effort. It can be set up and running within a matter of minutes and enables security teams to monitor their AWS environment, map and visualise resources and their relationships so that security teams can focus on what matters most.

The bottom line

As organisations undergo digital transformation efforts and move ever more resources to the cloud, visibility into what is happening in the cloud environment is vital for securing operations. Through provision of threat exposure and traffic flow analysis, Observer Sentry will prove to be effective for any organisation looking to better secure its
AWS environment.