Full packet analysis vs metadata analysis: which is more effective for network monitoring?

There’s more than one way for businesses to monitor network traffic for performance and security. And while the ultimate goal is the same, the two primary approaches for network monitoring diverge significantly in terms of cost and resource requirements.

Real-time network traffic monitoring is important for today’s environment where business is almost entirely run on the network via servers, the cloud, and network devices. Almost everything now runs on your network, and the criticality of performance increases each year as mission-critical applications rely on speed and precise availability.

At the same time, this digital way of conducting business increases the threat potential and the cost of cyber attacks. The attack surface has gotten larger as IoT devices come on board, employees use a range of mobile computing options, and businesses take advantage of hybrid cloud architectures and virtualization within these environments.

Real-time network monitoring both for performance and security has become non-negotiable.

Two options for capturing network behavior – packets or metadata 

If we agree network monitoring is a must, there are two ways to monitor this traffic.

1. Capturing every packet that traverses the network and analyzing it both for performance and security. This approach leaves no stone unturned and delivers the greatest possible monitoring capabilities because literally every one and zero that moves along the organization’s network is recorded and examined. This is a completist approach.

2. Metadata capture. In this approach, each packet of data is examined and only key characteristics are recorded and used for performance and security analysis.

With metadata capture, characteristics are recorded for analysis such as the IP address of the sender and the receiver, the path taken, the ports and protocols used, the application that the data came from, the location of the file on the source, the location of the destination, the hash of the file for identification, the file name, date and time, and other protocol specific information.

What won’t be stored and analyzed is the actual contents, however. If a video is streamed across the network, the characteristics of the video will be known but what is shown and said on that video will not be saved or used for network analysis. Similarly, a network monitoring solution that uses metadata capture will know the name of the spreadsheet transferred over the network, but not the individual rows of data that exist within this spreadsheet.

Is full packet analysis worth the cost?

The advantage of analyzing full packets is obvious: there’s a complete analysis of every bit of data that goes across a network. But with this approach, there’s also a pretty significant downside.

That downside of full packet analysis is, you guessed it, cost – the cost of moving this extra data across the network, the cost of storing this extra info, and the cost of processing all this network data.

The sheer magnitude of this additional cost is worth emphasizing.

Full packet analysis means that the data moving across the network increases dramatically as it gets copied to the service performing the analysis. This means a lot more data will be going across the network and significant network allocation will be required to handle this additional load.

Storing this extra data for complete packet analysis also will be large, of course. The price of cloud storage goes down by the year, but businesses that choose this approach will have to contend with significantly larger storage footprints and management of that extra data.

Then, there is the processing needed for analyzing full packets. This additional computing requirement is significant, but it becomes an even bigger problem since you’re likely to want to process the traffic close to the capture points to minimize the distances that data must travel across the network. If full packets are to be analyzed in real-time, packet analysis will need to take place at the network’s edge much of the time instead of at a centralized hub. That’s all that can be done, of course. But is this extra cost and complexity worth it?

The answer to this question usually is no. It doesn’t make sense to analyze the actual frames of a video or the rows of a spreadsheet to understand network performance and security dynamics. All that truly is needed are the characteristics that come from metadata capture.

There is an additional downside to full packet analysis, too: security. To analyze full packets, the data must be copied. Now there are two copies of the data that can be breached; two copies of the data that can break privacy regulations.

This extra data can help sensitive industries discover exactly what is stolen when customer records are taken or files go missing. But this advantage becomes more of a liability for all but a handful of industries with extremely sensitive data that is tightly controlled by compliance restrictions.

If the goal is to closely monitor client activity, or creating an audit trail of the exact data that is stolen, full packet analysis is the way to go. But for every other use case, metadata capture just makes sense when it comes to performance and network security monitoring.

As we navigate the complexities of network monitoring, the choice between full packet analysis and metadata capture reveals a balancing act between comprehensiveness and practicality. The cost and resource requirements of full packet analysis, while valuable for select scenarios, often outweigh its benefits for many businesses. In the era of expanding digital footprints and heightened security concerns, an efficient solution that delivers key insights without overburdening your network is crucial.

Find out firsthand how metadata capture strikes the perfect balance, providing essential network intelligence while preserving efficiency and security, visit our Skylight Product Tours.