LiveAction ready for action with Cisco on deep data packet analysis

Packet capture forensics and network visibility application vendor LiveAction has unveiled “deeper” integrations with Cisco’s unified computing systems C240 and S3260 servers.

Francine Geist, chief executive at US-based LiveAction, said in the announcement that the new integrations were another “milestone” in its “ongoing collaboration” with Cisco.

“(LiveAction is commited to) providing Cisco users with the data and analysis they need to ensure the performance and security of their network,” Geist said.

According to LiveAction, the foundation of these integrations is the certification of its LiveWire packet analysis solution to run on high-performance Cisco Unified Computing Systems (UCS) C240 and S3260 servers.

“This certification enables Cisco customers to seamlessly deploy LiveWire physical or virtual applications on their Cisco UCS hardware, unlocking unparalleled performance, storage density, and enhanced security and network visibility for netops and secops teams,” it said in the announcement.

According to LiveAction, this enables multiple data feeds from one appliance, incorporating feeds for up to three Cisco security platforms – SNA, Splunk, and XDR. The idea is this will reduce the mean time to responses (MTTR).

Integrated deep packet data is expected to streamline telemetry-to-forensic workflows, making it quicker to pinpoint causes of problems, capturing network packet data “at scale”, storing network packets where needed, and enabling less time to be spent on reproducing problems, the vendor said.

“Where (Cisco) SNA/ETA (encrypted traffic analysis) is not supported, LiveAction can now emulate the flow feed for legacy or non-Cisco infrastructure,” the vendor said. “The next generation of packet storage is now available on Cisco UCS.”

According to LiveAction, its overall goal is to achieve “unlimited” monitoring, control and visibility across networks. Products include LiveWire network forensics, LiveNX for network visibility from flow, simple network management protocol (SNMP), API and cloud telemetry, LiveSP for services providers and network protocol analyser Omnipeek.

LiveAction’s 2024 report on network performance monitoring (NPM) trends confirmed that many teams now monitor and manage many different kinds of network, versus the past of more homogeneous corporate IT.

Survey respondents, LiveAction said, indicated worries about a lack of visibility of heterogenous environments as well as challenges with complexity and configuration, achieving “actionable insights”, scalability and cost.

( Image by Dimitris Vetsikas from Pixabay )