cPacket Partners with Azure for their virtual network terminal access point (TAP) RSA launch
By Trey Moczygemba, Senior Product Manager
Introduction
cPacket is extremely pleased to announce our official partnership with Microsoft Azure on their introduction of their Azure virtual network terminal access point (TAP)! This partnership enables seamless out-of-band packet mirroring of Azure VM workloads with cPacket’s Cloud Suite, enabling packet brokering with advanced filtering, packet capture, and network analytics use cases in Azure environments.
The availability of Azure’s virtual network TAP makes it easier than ever to standup on-demand and continuous packet inspection, which enables security monitoring, compliance and audit, and performance monitoring use cases. This capability is critical for Azure customers who require secure, performant application and service availability. cPacket is excited to leverage these new Azure capabilities to bolster our packet broker, packet capture, and network analytics solutions in Azure.
Benefits using Azure virtual network TAP
Azure’s virtual network TAP solution brings a number of advantages for customers who require packet level visibility into Azure North-South and East-West workloads. Unlike some other CSP mirroring solutions, Azure’s virtual network TAP provides the ability to mirror the full throughput of Azure VM network interfaces without counting against the overall VM bandwidth. This makes it easy for customers to enable virtual network TAP capabilities without the sizing constraints present in some other solutions. Like cPacket’s approach to observability, virtual network TAP is also 100% agentless, ensuring performant mirroring performance without degrading workload performance.
Using Azure virtual network TAP with cPacket’s Azure Packet Broker
A significant advantage of pairing cPacket’s Packet Broker (cVu-V) with Azure’s new virtual network TAP is the capability to replicate a single packet to up to 10 different out-of-band tools, such as NDR, network monitoring, and packet inspection toolsets. Azure’s virtual network TAP is ideal when dealing with a single out-of-band toolset, however for customers who require providing packet telemetry to multiple toolsets, cVu-V perfectly complements virtual network TAP to deliver a single packet to up to 10 different toolsets, all from a 100% agentless solution.
cVu-V also supports autoscaling workloads by leveraging Virtual Machine Scale Sets (VMSS) for dynamic horizontal scaling capabilities, high availability (HA), and increased resiliency to handle traffic flows well beyond 100Gbps in Azure environments.
Using Azure virtual network TAP with cPacket’s Packet Capture
cPacket also delivers value through an integration with virtual network TAP and cPacket’s Packet Capture (cStor-V) solution. Virtual network TAP can deliver packets – using VXLAN encapsulation – to cStor-V instances as standalone virtual appliances or when used in conjunction with the cVu-V Packet Broker to enable continuous or on-demand packet capture for Azure workloads. The cStor-V Packet Capture solution, also 100% agentless, fully supports Azure VMSS for autoscaling to handle dynamic traffic patterns, HA, and increased resiliency. Using cStor-V, customers can capture packets beyond 100Gbps for on-demand or continuous network monitoring.
cStor-V runs Wireshark on-device for packet capture storage and analysis. In addition to capturing packets, cStor-V also offers a host of network analytics capabilities – including but not limited to protocol performance, latency characterization, measuring jitter, hop-by-hop analysis, exfiltration, DDoS detection and more. cStor-V can be utilized by both NetOps and SecOps teams who require deeper visibility into their Azure workloads and helps to serve security inspection, network performance monitoring (NPM), and compliance use cases. cStor-V is used in many Fortune 500 networks to reduce mean time to resolution (MTTR), improve end-user experiences, and to unlock deeper observability capabilities into Azure and hybrid network deployments.
Single User Interface for cPacket Analytics and VM Management
cPacket provides a Control Center (cClear-V) to simplify management of Azure VMs and hybrid deployments. In addition, cClear-V runs an instance of Grafana onboard to visualize network analytics and metrics and offers an Open API to query all cPacket virtual and physical appliances for packet capture retrieval and analytics from a single interface. This allows customers to aggregate, analyze, and surface network intelligence from Azure and hybrid datacenter deployments where cPacket appliances reside. This enables network observability capabilities for distributed Azure and datacenter monitoring points – all from a single user interface.
Conclusion
cPacket is thrilled to be a launch partner for Azure’s new virtual network TAP mirroring solution and is looking forward to supporting customers who want to leverage this new seamless mirroring in their own hybrid cloud deployments.
For more information about cPacket’s Cloud Suite, visit cPacket.com or Contact Us.
For more information about Azure virtual network tap, visit the Microsoft Learn link below.
