Live Demonstration of Application Layer Traffic Monitoring at 100 Gbps

The increasing speed of network links, together with great complexity of application protocol processing, require a new way of high-speed and precise network monitoring. To tackle this challenge, we have designed a brand new concept of hardware acceleration for flexible flow based traffic monitoring which we call Software Defined Monitoring (SDM). Application layer processing is performed by monitoring tasks implemented in software in conjunction with a configurable hardware accelerator. The hardware accelerator is a high-speed application-specific processor tailored to stateful flow processing. The software monitoring tasks control the level of detail retained by the hardware for packets of each flow. The live demonstration will show a real-time analysis of HTTP traffic at 100 Gbps using SDM implementation on our unique COMBO-100G card. COMBO-100G is the world’s first PCIe card with 100G Ethernet interface and wire-speed packet capture functionality. The influence of SDM on CPU load and packet drop rate will be presented in real-time graphs together with the results of HTTP analysis. The demo will clearly present evident benefits of SDM usage for application layer processing.