Kaloom introduces real-time INT for data center visibility

Kaloom's new in-band network telemetry and analytics tool, FlowEye, aims to bring monitoring, analytics and troubleshooting capabilities to data center managers. FlowEye will improve performance and lower operational expenditures, according to the vendor.

Kaloom's FlowEye provides real-time visibility to the virtual landscape of a data center. Powered by Barefoot Networks' P4 programmable switches, FlowEye traces packet routes as they travel horizontally through the data center architecture, including controllers, routers, gateways, security and other elements.

Data center visibility is crucial for organizations to understand their networks, prioritize security strategies and advance business processes without risk. As the virtual landscape of data center changes and expands, IDC predicts that the need for agility, manageability and asset usage will force companies to migrate more than 35% of their data center infrastructure to a software-defined model by the end of the year.

FlowEye users can build "self-driving" data center networks and closed loop systems that support orchestration, analytics and self-healing remediation for better operation. Without the need for separate monitoring and packet brokering boxes, capital expenditure is reduced by up to three times, according to Kaloom.

On the management side, FlowEye facilitates automatic anomaly correction in traffic handling, fixes network breaks and scales network resources up or down.

By using in-band network telemetry (INT) data, FlowEye gathers and reports the state of the network for analysis. According to Kaloom, their INT provides more insight to network troubleshooting and diagnostics, specifically, than traditional methodologies -- like using synthetic or statistical sampling and packet probing protocols such as ICMP.

Kaloom's INT aggregates telemetry data -- like data path, queue occupancy and latency of packets -- in real time, which provides a more granular insight and root cause analysis to pinpoint impending issues and find corrections.

This data is presented on a dashboard in four formats:

• spatial view, which shows the full network path;
• geo view, which physically shows where critical issues are;
• temporal view, which drills down into specific issues in real time; and
• cards view, which displays details of SLAs and KPIs for parameters.

FlowEye performs and displays packet inspection and flow visualization in less than five seconds with 100 ms precision, according to Kaloom.

What differentiates FlowEye from competition, according to Kaloom, is that lack of additional equipment to measure traffic, which saves on cost, latency and added effort.

Recently, Intel acquired Kaloom's partner vendor Barefoot Networks, whose use cases include powering Kaloom's Cloud Edge Fabric software.