Organizations are moving more and more of their analytics workloads to the cloud in a bid to cut costs, but a lot of data is still processed behind the firewall due to logistical reasons. Network logs, for instance, are so numerous that transmitting them to a remote third party facility is often impractical. Cisco Systems Inc. wants to fill the functionality gap with a beefy new on-premise monitoring appliance that is supposedly capable of scanning up to a million traffic flows per second.

Announced at a New York press conference today, the rack-based Tetration Analytics appliance draws its processing power from 39 UCS-C220 servers packed into its frame. Running on top is a real-time analytics engine that continuously collects operational information about the data center in which it’s deployed. Most of the logs are aggregated through server-based agents that Cisco says require less than one percent of the host’s CPU resources, while the rest comes from physical sensors in its Nexus switches. A customer can choose between tapping both sources for maximum visibility or using only one, an option designed mainly to accommodate environments that rely on third party network gear without compatible sensors.

After ingestion, Tetration runs the aggregated traffic data through a series of algorithms that can identify the applications in a company’s environments and create a detailed behavioral profile for each one. When an anomaly is detected, the appliance brings the incident to the IT department’s attention through a visual interface specifically designed with troubleshooting in mind. A built-in search bar enables administrators to quickly dig up problematic network flows, while complementary modelling functionality makes it possible to piece together the individual details into a full picture of the issue. And to top it off, Cisco also included predictive capabilities into the system for simulating configuration changes before implementing them in production.

The manual analytics functionality is paired with a recommendation engine designed to speed up some of the more time-consuming tasks involved in scanning traffic data. Cisco claims that Tetration is able to suggest application configuration changes, find compliance violations and even point out workloads that are under tighter security restrictions than they should be. The 39-node appliance is set to become available for order next month, with the vendor hinting that additional configurations may be introduced further down the line.

Image via Geralt