Virtual traffic capture for network and application performance management

Virtual traffic capture and performance management

Virtual traffic capture is key in carrying out network and application performance management (NPM/APM) in today’s complex IT environments.

Virtualization is widely spread and raises some new challenges for network analysis and network-based APM. To analyze and troubleshoot performance degradations in application chains, which are partially or totally virtualized, you need to capture virtual traffic (i.e., traffic between virtual machines that does not go through the physical network).

What are your objectives?

Depending on the virtualization architecture in place, many options are available. There is no perfect choice whatever the environment and constraints are. The right option depends on your specific context:

• What type of virtualization software is used?
• What kind of virtual switch is in place?
• How often do you need to be able to analyze virtual traffic?
• How many VMs should be monitored?
• Security concerns and compliance issues
• Economic constraints

Which options should you consider?

Here is some data on the different options available in a VMware environment:

For more information on how to use the Virtual Distributed Switch (VDS) check out our guide “How to capture traffic with VDS“. Or, if you’d like to read more on how PerformanceVision provides wide-angle visibility on the Virtual / Cloud datacenters, please check this page.

You might also be interested in this guide on “How to implement RUM in Virtual and Cloud data centers”.