A couple of months ago we announced our new Universal Data Records (UDR) architecture, which enables the Kentik Data Engine (our distributed big data backend) to flexibly allocate columns to the flow fields of diverse devices. We then announced three integrations based on UDR, one for Palo Alto Networks firewalls, one for Cisco Adaptive Security Appliances (ASA), and one for Istio service mesh (Beta). We’ve now added another new integration, this time for Silver Peak appliances running Virtual Acceleration Open Architecture (VXOA version 8.1.8 or higher).

These appliances analyze packets as traffic flows through, identify the application with which each packet is associated, and prioritize routing by applying application-specific rules. Our new integration will enable you to filter or group-by in Kentik Detect using the application names identified by Silver Peak and stored in KDE flow records.

If you have a Silver Peak appliance, here’s a quick look at how to use information from it in Kentik Detect:

• Step 1: From the Kentik portal’s Admin » Devices page, use the Add Device button at upper right to open the Add Device dialog, then add a new Silver Peak device. The Type field on the General tab should be set to Silver Peak VXOA.

• Step 2: In the Data Explorer sidebar, click in the Devices pane to open the Devices dialog (see Device Selector with Sidebar). In the Types list on the dialog’s sidebar, click Silver Peak VXOA to include the new device in the set of queried devices, then click Save to close the dialog.

• Step 3: Back in the main Data Explorer window, click Group by Dimensions in the sidebar’s Query pane to open the dimension selector. Now that a Silver Peak device is included in the selected devices, you’ll be able to choose a dimension from the Silver Peak VXOA section. To date the only available Silver Peak dimension is Application Name, which enables you to better understand the applications generating the traffic that flows through your Silver Peak appliances. Note that at this point this dimension would also be available for use in the Filtering pane.

• Step 4: The Application Name dimension can now be used in a query to correlate network traffic with specific applications. The sample Sankey diagram below, for example, shows traffic destined for applications such as Gmail, YouTube, and Splunk exiting via two Silver Peak devices (silverpeak_sf and silverpeak_hnl) to service providers Zayo and HNTEL.

For information or assistance with using Silver Peak dimensions, please contact our Customer Success team.