cPacket Networks has today announced (at Cisco Live) a new network performance and monitoring solution that radically simplifies the way in which cloud and data center professionals pinpoint issues. This means they can find and act upon network problems before user experiences are negatively impacted.

The new cPacket solution is called SPIFEE (Stream & Packet Inspection Front End Environment). It includes the new cPacket Search which, in the same way a Google Search finds relevant information from anywhere in the Web based on text strings, makes it possible to "grep" the entire network -- in real-time and immediately find relevant traffic patterns, performance bottlenecks, and applications misbehavior.

"Until now, network professionals have invested enormous time and effort in storing large amounts of traffic on disk, and then trying to post-process that data to analyze network performance and applications problems," said Rony Kay, founder and CEO of cPacket. "This is both very costly and doesn't scale to the massive amounts of traffic in today's network environments. Moreover, too much time and too many resources are spent collecting unusable data, instead of analyzing and solving actual problems. Our goal is to enable network professionals to surgically search and find what they need instantly."

The SPIFEE solution streamlines distributed deployments of cPacket's cVu traffic monitoring switches. SPIFEE capabilities include:

• Real-time grep for any specific traffic, anywhere in the network, according to any combination of header fields and patterns in the packets payload content, providing instantly ranked results.
• Interactive visual mapping and dashboards of all the smart ports from the cPacket cVu devices across the network. These include unified access for filtering, forwarding, aggregating, replicating, balancing, and archiving granular performance and health metrics.
• On-the-fly analysis of network performance, application's behavior, and trends. These can be viewed with a simple      performance gadget and combined with proactive alerts based on thresholds, ratios and events. Moreover, these alerts can be easily adjusted for different needs with sophisticated scripting.

Overall, SPIFEE provides a streamlined approach to a continuous improvement cycle of network operations, optimization, and trouble shooting. It perpetually monitors the network and provides proactive notice of anomalies, performance bottlenecks, spikes, and application behavior abnormalities. In combination with the real-time network grep function, SPIFEE allows instant drill down into any relevant information that is needed to solve problems.

World's First Real-time Grep: Search the Network for What You Need When You Need It

"Unfortunately, in today's environment, network operators spend the vast majority of their time trying to locate relevant information, or sifting through vast amount of unusable data, when they look for network problems," said Kay. "Instead, it would be more efficient to invest that time analyzing and solving actual problems."

cPacket recognized that the challenge of solving network problems is like finding a needle in a haystack and it is getting dramatically more difficult with increased network speeds and complexity. As a result, the company developed its unique grep technology which performs real-time distributed search across the entire data center network to isolate suspected traffic profiles according to any combination of header fields and payload content. From a web browser, a SPIFEE user can search on-the-fly for a particular pattern match or a signature, such as a cookie, URL or user ID, and have only the right packets isolated for deeper investigation. Moreover, this real-time insight can be used to define custom key performance indicators (KPI's) and to trigger proactive alerts to identify problems before they emerge.

According to Kay, "The uses of this instant network search are virtually limitless. We know that our users will invent many ways to benefit from SPIFEE that we didn't even anticipate."