4 Ways Big Data Network Monitoring Benefits Your Business!

 By its very nature, big data exceeds the capability of most corporate networks.

Simply due to the sheer volumes of data that big data projects use, traditional networks are finding themselves unable to cope with the pressures. Thus, new ways of managing data have had to be created.

After all, according to IDC, there will be 450 billion Internet transactions every day. Walmart now processes over 1 million customer transactions per hour, generating 2.5 petabytes of data. Every minute, YouTube produces 48 hours of new video content. Every day, Facebook processes 100 gigabytes of data.

As a solution, significant data projects rely on virtual storage and cloud-based resources, which means that monitoring huge data networks is more important than ever. To ensure enterprise performance and security, tools and procedures for evaluating and categorising data flow must be in place.

When it comes to big data network monitoring, the three Vs you need to think about. These are

l Volume

l Velocity

l Variety

All of these play an important role, and you can’t have one without the ones.

“No matter what, the volume of data must be monitored and regulated. Different data kinds, such as text, semi-structured data like social media, location-based data, and log-file data, are among the data types.

Data velocity, or the speed of your data, makes big data network monitoring more difficult, not only because data is generated faster than has previously been possible, but also because data must be monitored in real-time,” explains Sarah Hatchett, a business writer at State of writing and Essay Roo.

In short, all of this data has the potential to aid big data analytics, but it must also be monitored and managed.

Switches for Network Monitoring

Big data network monitoring necessitates real-time, scalable, malware-scanning, and data routing for analytics or storage solutions. Basically, it’s an all-in-one solution for all your big data needs, as long as you’re using a solution that provides what you’re looking for.

However, it’s these very characteristics that make actual traffic monitoring more challenging.

For now, you need to be focusing on using network monitoring switches since this is the only method to get a complete view for large data network monitoring.

According to Forrester, these switches are one of the three basic technology tools that any large data centre must have, also known as "network packet brokers" by Gartner.

“Switched port analysers (SPAN) and test access ports (TAP) collect data from network monitoring switches, replicating all data travelling over the network to provide an overall picture of network traffic for security and performance optimisation,” explains Terry Butcher, a technical writer at Boom Essays and Lia Help.

Using Apps for Big Data Network Monitoring

With network packet brokers in place, you now have the tools you need to take advantage of big data network monitoring for the following purposes:

Load Balancing: You can load balancing by having data flow via central corporate junctions and by managing your packet stream inputs and outputs in real-time. You can also use centralised switches also keep session data together, making way for easier analysis.

Data Filtering: This refers to filtering both inbound and outbound traffic, all while allowing you to focus on a single packet stream, should you need to.

Inbound filters, for example, can route and store data using packet headers while preserving data in packet payloads. It can help optimise bandwidth by removing superfluous data streams. Outbound filters can be used to prioritise data traffic for monitoring tools like sending VoIP traffic to a VoIP analyser.

This is crucial not only for specific big data applications but also for organisational security, as big data may be used to detect infections and network breaches before they happen.

Conclusion

Any network monitoring method should give you complete visibility into your network infrastructure, so it’s up to you to figure out what method is best for you and will enable you to deliver the best results. Bear in mind everything you need to bear in mind, and you can effectively go about keeping everything running smoothly.

It’s by being this kind of proactive that you’ll be able to optimise your workflows, the way you operate your business, and ultimately how successful your big data projects will be.

Christina Lee is a technology and IT systems manager at Write my essay and Academized. She writes about marketing news and technologies for such services, as OX Essays and others, and helps businesses come to terms with modern technologies

Old School vs New Tool - CDP Discovery

 In this video, I compare how long it takes the NetAlly LinkRunner G2 and a Windows laptop running Wireshark, to determine what switch and port it is connected to. In my opinion, this is the most common task that most IT professionals perform.

I too have been in that scenario where I'm tracing a cable in someone's office and it goes behind the desk or partition. If you are lucky, you can pull the desk aside, slide your phone behind the desk to get a photo of the cable label. In some cases, the label is missing. Would you trust the label in the first place?

Then you proceed to look for the floor map and guess what the cable identifier is, look for some sort of cable documentation, or maybe someone put a cable identification label on the switch port. But is the documentation or switch port description kept current?

Alternatively, you can get the MAC address of the client's computer and check the local switches to see which port it is associated with. Tough for me, as an external consultant in most environments, I typically don’t have management access. Even if I did, going to a switch CLI (“show mac address-table dynamic” or similar) or web management interface… You can easily spend 30 minutes trying to figure this out.

Lastly, if you have SNMP enabled and access to the SNMP read-only string, and the proper SNMP query tool, you can try to figure it out that way.

Sometimes it's hard to justify the cost of a tool but exercises like this helps and I would encourage you to do the same. This is also valuable when comparing tools. You can compare how long it takes to do the most common task, or the number of clicks, etc.

Update... It was suggested that I add another test. Same procedure but with the LinkRunner G2 and Laptop already powered on.

Here are the results:

Test	Average Time (seconds)
LinkRunner G2	5
Laptop with Wireshark	32