Big Switch Networks Rolls Out Hybrid Cloud Monitoring for AWS Product

Big Switch Networks on Thursday announced the general availability Big Monitoring Fabric (Big Mon) for AWS Public Cloud Monitoring, signaling the company’s first step in solidifying its strategy for enabling monitoring and switching for hybrid cloud.

Earlier this year, Big Switch Networks talked about bringing the next set of principles to enable hybrid cloud. In July, it announced its intent to enable virtual private cloud (VPCs) visibility and VPC analytics everywhere.

The vendor’s two main products designed to bring cloud principals to enterprise data center networks are: Big Cloud Fabric for data center switching and Big Monitoring Fabric for data center visibility. Expect to see general availability for Big Cloud Fabric (Big Mon) for AWS, currently in beta, early next year.

Big Switch Networks’ Prashant Gandhi

“With our monitoring product, Big Monitoring Fabric, being productized in AWS public cloud, essentially enabling VPC visibility, traffic monitoring and analytics, we’ve taken our first step to enable workload monitoring within customer specified VPS,” Prashant Gandhi, chief product officer at Big Switch Networks told Channel Futures.

With the Big Mon solution, packets from multiple workloads across multiple VPCs are replicated and forwarded to the “monitoring VPC.” Big Mon’s elastic architecture scales out automatically as workloads and/or associated network traffic grows. The solution centralizes and simplifies operations, and is also cost effective, as traffic stays local between the VPCs, according to the company.

Additionally, any AWS cloud-based monitoring or security tool can be connected to Big Mon Fabric for deeper security and application performance monitoring (APM).

Big Mon for AWS components include:

• Big Mon Controller: a cloud-based controller that enables AWS workload discovery, automatic monitoring of customer selected workloads and centralized policy configuration, as well as support for customer-defined elastic scaling options for pervasive visibility in an intuitive and easy to use manner
• CloudLight AX: a lightweight software agent that installs automatically on AWS instances selected for monitoring. It mirrors the traffic from the workloads to send it to CloudLight VX for further processing.
• CloudLight VX: a lightweight virtual switch software managed by the Big Mon Controller. It filters traffic received from one or more CloudLight AX agents, optionally applies packet-modification functions and delivers the resulting traffic to the cloud-based centralized tool farm.

Big Mon for AWS capabilities include: centralized packet and flow-based monitoring of all VPCs of a user account; visibility-related traffic is kept local for security purposes and cost savings; monitoring and security tools are centralized and tagged within the dedicated VPC for ease of configuration; role-based access control enables multiple teams to operate Big Mon; supports centralized AWS VPC tool farm to reduce monitoring cost; and integration with Big Switch’s Multi-Cloud Director for centralized hybrid cloud management.

“This product enables customers who’ve deployed BMF [Big Mon Fabric] on-prem to bring that same experience in AWS,” said Gandhi. 

According to IDC, worldwide cloud IT spend, including public and private cloud, grew 45.5 percent year over year in the first quarter of 2018, reaching $12.9 billion. The forecast for total spending for cloud IT infrastructure for 2018 is expected to reach $57.2 billion in 2018, with year-over-year growth of 21.3 percent.