Solving your network problems requires strong visibility and adequate monitoring of your network, otherwise, you’re stumbling around blindly. Your security and network monitoring tools are only as good as your visibility, and you need to be able to see the ENTIRE network.

Comprehensive Traffic Adaptation to Meet Your Business Needs and Save You Money

The visibility adaptation layer is an important driving force in cutting operating costs and improving ROI, enabling maximal cost-effectiveness in how you manage and secure your resources. By implementing our full range of products, you can enhance this layer so that it offers not only critical visibility but the capability to adapt traffic for each required service.

The visibility adaptation layer adjusts and modifies traffic for each required service as needed, by blocking, filtering, aggregating, replicating, stripping, tunneling, load balancing and more—at up to 100Gb rates. Our products can also apply other traffic processing capabilities, such as de-duplication to offload advanced processing capabilities to the visibility layer.

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Integrated Network Monitoring Tools Work Alone or Together for Optimum Effectiveness
At the lowest level – the Visibility access points level – Niagara Networks components are designed to work best together as well as initially being capable of acting as self-contained and independent modules within the network topology. Each access point, whether serviced by one of our network taps, network packet brokers (NPBs), or network bypass switches, is a seamless yet necessary part of the overall design.

At the same time, hybrid components as well modules that are made up of specific combinations of network visibility layer enhancing devices are employed as specific building blocks for key network links and access points. An example of this would be a combination of NPBs and bypass switches. In another example, the network bypass switch can even be used as a network tap. In any and all cases, however, the correct placement of the individual network monitoring tools (or groups thereof) is the key and essential ingredient for effective integrated network performance.

At the higher level – the Services level – Niagara Networks offers the right balance of tools and modules. The scenarios and tasks they are meant to handle range from the simplest, straightforward requirements, to the most complex of network topologies. This provides for full, pervasive network visibility that is so mission-critical in the network’s performance, its management, and troubleshooting requirements, and particularly in ensuring the maximum network security visibility shield for SOC teams.

The two levels of Niagara Networks offerings (the Services and the Visibility layers) and the solutions they provide make for a stable and secure networks.
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Niagara’s Network Monitoring Tools

Connect to all elements in the network for complete “pervasive” visibility.

We Design, Develop and Manufacture our Products in the Silicon Valley, USA.

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Network TAPs

Tap into your network with passive or active TAPs. A wide range of network monitoring tool connectors and fiber types are supported. Passive TAPs are based on an optical splitter so that the tapped network point and appliance are always connected. Active TAPs are based on optical or copper relay, ensuring full physical signal regeneration at the tapped network point.
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Bypass

Our signature product based on Inline Bypass offers a bypass segment comprising of two network ports and two appliance ports. Double-protection bypass technology offers a failsafe optical or copper relay on network monitoring tool ports and a user-configurable heartbeat generated packet on appliance ports. Use heartbeat technology to automatically detect appliance failure and failover to the network, and back to the appliance, based on the appliance’s availability. Inline Bypass is available in multiple size bypass segments, supporting a range of network interfaces up to 400Gb. All products based on Inline Bypass can be user-configured as active TAPs.
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Packet Broker

Niagara Networks' advanced packet brokers serve as a bridge platform that can be deployed in either enterprise or service provider environments, providing extended visibility into on-prem, private, public, and hybrid cloud networks.

As part of the advanced packet broker offering, Niagara Networks’ unique Open Visibility solution can host any 3rd party virtual tools on a single appliance, leveraging hardware-accelerated traffic processing for enhanced performance. This includes advanced IPv4 and IPv6 packet parsing and manipulation from OSI Layer 2 up to Layer 7 with advanced functions like header and payload slicing, data masking, application filtering, NetFlow/IPFIX metadata generation, tunnel termination (ERSPAN, GRE, NVGRE, VXLAN, GENEVE, etc.), selective TLS decryption, mobile visibility, deduplication, packet replication and Regular Expression filtering, to support sophisticated packet conditioning use cases.

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Niagara Visibility Controller (NVC) - Visibility Orchestration

The Niagara Visibility Controller serves as a unified management layer for all products within the visibility layer, creating a virtual switching fabric and enabling effective resource allocation. It simplifies the process of setting up comprehensive monitoring for your network monitoring tools and provides an intuitive overview of the health and status of the visibility adaptation layer. Acting as an orchestration solution, the Niagara Visibility Controller seamlessly provisions, enables, and enforces new, dynamic, on-demand visibility services, ensuring optimal network performance and adaptability.

Niagara Networks Integrated Pervasive Visibility Solutions

The pervasive visibility solutions proposed by Niagara Networks are comprised of two levels of mechanisms that work together to provide you with the means to maintain a constant and comprehensive control over the network and its performance. These two levels are hardware components for bearing the brunt of the work to achieve full network visibility, and software mechanisms built into our software-defined network (SDN) based management system.

Comprehensive Visibility Solution Architecture

Achieving global and comprehensive network visibility requires identifying potential blind spots and failure points and designing the network infrastructure to incorporate monitoring tools that eliminate or significantly reduce visibility gaps. This can be accomplished by strategically allocating and positioning network TAPs, bypasses, and packet brokers (NPBs) to create a visibility adaptation layer that covers all potential access points across physical and virtual cloud environments.
Beyond deploying network visibility components based on their individual merits, combining the unique strengths of these components can elevate your network's visibility and functionality. In addition to traditional hardware devices such as TAPs and switches that support network monitoring tools, Niagara Networks offers a versatile toolkit that includes innovative solutions like the virtual cloud packet broker and virtual TAPs. These tools enable complete visibility across hybrid infrastructures, including on-premises, public, and private cloud networks.
This powerful combination extends the visibility adaptation layer from traditional on-premises perimeters to virtually any network infrastructure, providing security and networking teams with end-to-end visibility. Whether it’s physical, virtual, North-South, or East-West traffic, Niagara Networks ensures seamless and comprehensive monitoring capabilities.

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In addition to just deploying the network visibility components on the basis of their own merit, by combining the advantageous features of the different types of components, you can ratchet your network pervasive visibility and functionality up a few notches. In addition to the standard elementary H/W devices (TAPs, switches, etc.) that support network monitoring tools, Niagara Network’s toolkit of versatile products includes the new virtual cloud packet broker and virtual TAPs to enable complete visibility across a hybrid on-premises and public and private cloud networks.   This combination offers even more advanced capabilities for the network visibility adaptation layer to extend the visibility layer from on-prem traditional perimeter to almost any virtual network infrastructure to enable security and networking teams to gain end-to-end network visibility across any network infrastructure – physical, virtual, North-South, and East-West

Visibility Orchestration Component

The effectiveness of your network monitoring tools - and, by extension, the overall capability of your network security - largely depends on the availability of network visibility for network managers and IT staff. This is the service layer where Niagara Networks’ advanced monitoring and management product, the Niagara Visibility Controller (NVC), demonstrates its value.

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The NVC GUI provides precise views and management capabilities to ensure smooth network visibility operations. It integrates with the services layer of the visibility adaptation layer to address three critical areas: visibility, efficiency, and availability.

  • Visibility: Gain real-time insights into network activity through strategically deployed monitoring tools and the NVC's comprehensive view, enabling anomaly tracking and swift, informed responses.
  • Efficiency: Ensure monitoring tools and network devices, such as switches, routers, and NPBs, work seamlessly with security services to maintain data flow, reroute traffic, or quarantine suspect packets as needed.
  • Availability: Maintain uninterrupted business continuity with automatic failover mechanisms that seamlessly reroute control and data traffic during disruptions, working alongside monitoring tools and inline bypass devices.

Pervasive visibility through the network visibility adaptation layer ensures seamless performance, meeting critical business needs with confidence.
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