Ixia’s Guide to Network Visibility Terms and Acronyms

Introduction

Network visibility is about removing blind spots that are obscuring the ability to readily see or quantify the performance of the network. This includes the applications running over the network as well. This visibility is what enables IT to quickly isolate security threats and resolve performance issues, ultimately ensuring the best possible end user experience. This guide is intended to give you a quick and easy reference to common network visibility and monitoring terms along with their meanings.

Active Monitoring:

Type of network monitoring in which test traffic is injected into a live network to verify network performance.

Application Programming Interface (API): Set of subroutine definitions, protocols, and tools for building application software. Also used commonly as the documented and open means to access the services and functionality of a piece of software.

Application Performance Monitoring (APM): Area of information technology (IT) that focuses on making sure software application programs perform as expected to provide end users with a high quality of experience (QoE).

Application and Threat Intelligence (ATI): Real-time threat intelligence feeds with up-to- the moment content changes for security and application related data.

Automation: Automation refers to a task or function that is performed without requiring human intervention.

Blind Spots:

Blind spots are areas where there is a lack of network visibility. These areas often contain unforeseen problems or threats.

Bypass Switch:

Specialized network data tap that has fail-over capability integrated within it. Typically used for inline security tools to make them more reliable.

Central Office Re-architected as a Data Center (CORD):

Carriers use SDN and NFV to transform their carrier functions into workloads that are hosted on a common infrastructure. It is an approach of providing infrastructure as a service and networking services as tenant applications for that infrastructure. Major service providers, like AT&T,  SK Telecom, Verizon, China Unicom, and NTT Communications already support CORD.

Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI):

Cisco System’s proprietary approach to support Software Defined Networking (SDN).

Command Line Interface (CLI):

Means of interacting with a computer program that uses a text-based interface for creating and issuing computer commands.

Compliance:

Standards and regulations, such as PCI-DSS, SOX and HIPAA, require organizations to take specific action to protect sensitive customer data. This means IT teams must proactively identify processes and solutions to ensure compliance when using public cloud.

Data Masking:

Replaces vulnerable or sensitive data with safe information. When data is masked, it is altered so that the basic format remains the same, but the key values are hidden.

Deep Packet Inspection:

Monitoring that examines the payload or data portion of a packet, as opposed to just the packet headers.

East-West Traffic:

Traffic in a virtual data center that moves from one virtual machine (VM) or application to another but does not pass to the top of the rack.