Introducing The Cisco Telemetry Broker – Cisco Blogs

Today’s security professionals face a growing number of competing priorities. Where a CIO’s job was once to “keep the lights on,” they are now asked to be part of conversations around revenue generation. Top of mind are discussions around migrating workloads to the cloud, being proper stewards of customer data, all while finding ways to maximize all of the data at their disposal to drive business results.

Furthermore, in a highly segmented market like security, more and more vendors have a low barrier to enter and compete, and a security teams will never have one tool to rule them all. The use cases across NetOps, SecOps, DevOps are also vast. Security professionals will have their own preferences for tools for specific use cases, be they from well-known vendors, to small ones, or even homegrown tools.

One thing remains constant – they all need telemetry to work.

However, management of telemetry itself increases in complexity with added network complexity. The network is growing quickly and the demands on security administrators to provide telemetry to tools only grows. Current telemetry and data management options can also become expensive as more sources are added to the network, forcing security teams to make some tough budget choices. Visibility also becomes an issue as security professionals have to work with an array of different and often proprietary protocols for their tools for choice.

Simply managing an organization’s telemetry is often a full-time job with complex spreadsheets handed down through several admins. Today’s sophisticated customers warrant a new Cisco offering to help free telemetry from proprietary protocols and allow customers and tools to coexist seamlessly.

That’s where The Cisco Telemetry Broker comes in!

The Cisco Telemetry Broker optimizes your telemetry pipelines for the hybrid cloud. It vastly simplifies the consumption of telemetry data for your business-critical tools by brokering hybrid cloud data, filtering unneeded data, and transforming data to your preferred usable format. It is software not hardware, it is programmable, and it solves the problem of any one analytics platform holding exclusivity to a telemetry stream.

Cisco’s Telemetry Broker has roots in the Stealthwatch UDP Director, which simply replicated UDP traffic to multiple destinations. The Cisco Telemetry Broker will build upon the successes of the UDP Director, while also creating a new market – the Telemetry Broker market.

Cisco Telemetry Broker will provide several key functionalities that will address the growing concerns of our customers.

1. Brokering Data: Easily replicate network telemetry to multiple destinations, accelerating your ability to conduct proof of value assessments.
2. Filtering Data: Filter the signal from the noise. Send high value data to analytics tools, but segment out low value data to low-cost storage for compliance.
3. Transforming Data: Bring down VPC Flow Log and convert it to IPFIX, so it’s useable in your favorite on-prem tool.

We seek to democratize telemetry for all!

Cisco Telemetry Broker will be available starting April 1^st, 2021.

We’ll have more information to share soon, so be sure to keep an eye on Cisco.com in the coming weeks.

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