SmarTIE overview
SmarTIE is the first monitoring solution that effectively combines active and passive techniques to offer a unique visibility on usage, performance and security of network infrastructures and applications.
TRAFFIC AND QoS ACCOUNTING
ANOMALY DETECTION
What is SmarTIE?
The platform came to life as an answer to real-time infrastructure monitoring needs, focusing on the performance perceived by applications and services on these infrastructures.
SmarTIE provides instruments and indicators to improve network management and to ease troubleshooting, detecting and notifying anomalous events that can compromise the quality of experience in real time.
SmarTIE combines application traffic classification and performance monitoring functionalities. It identifies the applications generating traffic flows with high accuracy and low resource consumption.
The product includes the active monitoring techniques embedded in SmarTIE generate upstream and/or downstream traffic flows into the network emulating user and application behavior. Generated and received traffic is analyzed in real-time to build performance indicators.
For example, SmartTIE can generate CBR UDP flows mimicking VoIP traffic and record throughput, delay, jitter, losses, etc., and/or it can (concurrently) download 4K videos from youtube.com and record throughput, buffering, VideoMOS and others.
The product is based on a well known and widely used open source platform for traffic classification called Traffic Identification Engine (TIE), which has been founded by the Traffic research group of the University of Naples “Federico II”. NM2 is a spin-off of such research group and represents the main contributor to the project. TIE is an open-source multi-classification platform able to combine multiple classification techniques with different strategies. The TIE engine part of the SmarTIE solution comes with additional features and improved performance. SmarTIE exposes, through an easy to use web interface, a set of intuitive views on network traffic (aggregated on many different criteria) and measured performance (from L3 to L7 based on scheduled measurements).
Why use SmarTIE?
- One tool to monitor the performance of your network, there is no need to integrate other systems and share data across them
- Single Web interface, accessible from any device (laptop, tablet or smartphone) to monitor the traffic stats and performance trends in real time on your network
- Completely oriented to network infrastructure monitoring and usage by apps or services
- Support for well-known measurements tools
KEY FEATURES
Active Monitoring
- Real-time views of infrastructure and applications health and performance
- Flexible scheduling of measurements
- Extensible measurement modules with custom metric
- Open RESTful API
Passive Monitoring
- Application level traffic visibility
- Traffic and qos accounting
- Real-time anomaly detection and notification
- Automatic generation of custom reports
How does SmarTIE work?
The platform gives large flexibility on choosing the observation points and allows to improve gradually the monitoring detail level and coverage. SmarTIE relies on 3 main components:
- Control module – A logically centralized Management and Control System coordinates all the agents to perform the measurements on the network and collects flow-level reports produced by the agents and other network devices. This module performs analytics on such results, in order to derive customizable views and detect and notify anomalies. All the observed traffic is maintained at different granularities for a configurable period of time (up to years) in order to offer interactive historical views and generate reports, which can be exported in different formats. Designed to be scalable and support large number of agents.
- Portable agent – They are available as physical hardware appliances, virtual appliances or application software for most common operating systems. Their deployment is made as simple as possible, leaving most configuration tasks to the Control module. Traffic monitoring agents dynamically select and combine different techniques, including a patented lightweight DPI inspection technique suitable for real-time classification up to 100 Gbps. The agents can be flexibly and dynamically distributed to monitor the most strategic segments of your network.
- Measurement module – Cooperating counterparts needed for the measurements. Measurements can be performed towards real services (e.g., response time of a web service) or towards Dedicated Systems specifically dimensioned and located to isolate the factors affecting network performance.
Starter Plan
- Basic installation and configuration support
- Bugfix-only upgrades
- Best-effort troubleshooting assistance
Advanced
- Advanced installation and configuration support
- Priority troubleshooting assistance
- Measurements planning assistance
- Data analysis and interpretation assistance
- Bugfix and improvement upgrades
Customize
- Advanced installation and configuration support
- High priority troubleshooting assistance
- Measurements planning assistance
- Data analysis and interpretation assistance
- Bugfix and improvement upgrades
- Integration with third-party systems
- User interface customization
- Ad-hoc metrics and measurements
- Pro-active troubleshooting of platform components
- Remote training sessions
