ExtraHop Application Delivery Assurance system

New start-up ExtraHop Networks' flagship product offering is a network traffic monitoring and analysis appliance that can be used by network administrators for such tasks as performance tuning, network troubleshooting, and capacity planning. The appliance is deployed passively on the network--off of a SPAN or TAP--and is able to automatically sniff and decipher the protocols it understands, displaying collected information in drill-down, point-and-click screens in a Web-based GUI. Among the protocols that the vendor states are recognized out of the box are HTTP, DB, SSL, DNS, ICMP, TCP, Multicast, and IPv6; and "...New protocol support is added on a continuous basis...". In addition to the Web (browser) based interface, the appliance can also be accessed via an iPhone interface.

Upon deployment, the device automatically detects the various devices on the network and classifies them based on the types of traffic being delivered to and from them. No agents or device-specific configurations are required. For those protocols natively understood by the appliance's "networking micro-kernel," the appliance is able to offer a visual, drillable display (by applications, devices, or protocols) that enables admins to discover such information as specific error messages occurring for each device, numbers of connections (and where the connections are coming from), traffic tuning related statistics (along with online help screens), etc. DB-specific analysis includes the ability to report stored procedures. The vendor states that the appliance provides full Layer-2 through Layer-7 visibility, and alerting (onscreen, E-mail, SNMP trap) is also supported for any numerical metric in the system.

Historical information is also captured by the appliance, making such tasks as capacity planning possible. The product's baselining features are able to learn over time, capturing baseline metrics separately by time of day and day of week. Baselines are banded by the 5th and 95th percentiles.

Metrics provided by the vendor for the initially available appliance include throughput of 1 Gb/sec and storage space of 250 GB.

The ExtraHop Application Delivery Assurance system is available now, pricing starts at $50,000.

Contact ExtraHop for further information.