Extending performance visibility into AWS

Directly or indirectly, large numbers of enterprises rely on Amazon Web Services (AWS) for service delivery in some way. Whether they are your own applications or third-party applications, there is an unceasing movement of data, traffic, and compute power from data centers to the public cloud. With AWS still at the head of the pack, its role in enterprise network performance is undeniable.

Nonetheless, many enterprises are still challenged by understanding the true performance of this part of their hybrid network. In some cases, this is due to a dearth of performance metrics. In other cases, it is due to the excess of performance metrics and the challenge of filtering out the signal from the noise.

“Right-sizing” your visibility into AWS environments is achievable but requires a comprehensive approach that can ingest both packets and AWS VPC Flow Logs. Such broad visibility enhances troubleshooting efficiency, allowing teams to better understand and improve the end-user experience. It also enables the identification of anomalies, accelerating the troubleshooting process and reducing the mean time to resolution. This enhanced visibility delivers comprehensive data intelligence for network troubleshooting, security forensics, and regulatory compliance.

Enriched-flow intelligence is another essential tool for managing performance and security challenges. By combining different data sets into a single enriched record, companies can gain in-depth details for security and performance analysis on applications and traffic patterns. This process involves polling the AWS S3 bucket to ingest both VPC Flow Log and EC2 information for different regions, offering user-focused insight and better control over AWS environments.

When the right performance data has been gathered, it then needs to be made available and presented in a way that rapidly surfaces insights so that appropriate action can be taken. As no public cloud is an island, the entire picture of the hybrid network needs to be made available, delivering comprehensive real-time visibility of critical applications, whether hosted on AWS or on-premises in the data center.

When that comprehensive view is available from AWS environments and beyond, enterprises can achieve a simplified picture of their network performance, and even deliver a clear understanding of the end-user experience, leading to more efficient analysis and troubleshooting of application performance issues. Likewise, for network security, a centralized platform can also help investigate and document incidents of concern or confirmed security breaches, providing in-depth post-event forensics.

By managing end-user experience, performance, and security in a centralized manner, enterprises can deliver a “single source of truth” and foster more productive collaboration between parallel teams as they identify and address performance and security issues.

Extending performance visibility into AWS is a strategic necessity for enterprises navigating the evolving landscape of hybrid IT deployments. By gaining comprehensive visibility into AWS environments and factoring it into a bigger picture, enterprises can better manage and troubleshoot their applications, improve end-user experience, and respond to security challenges more effectively.

The VIAVI Observer Cloud Monitoring solution provides multi-faceted visibility into on-premises, AWS, and hybrid IT environments. It can ingest both packets and AWS VPC Flow Logs to improve visibility and facilitate efficient troubleshooting, enabling NetOps, SecOps, and AWS architecture teams to better understand and enhance the end-user experience.

 Learn more about Cloud Monitoring from VIAVI.