LiveNX 6.0 – SD-WAN Deployment & Cisco IWAN Enhancements

Introducing LiveNX 6.0

Today is a new release day here at LiveAction, which means you will now have access to the latest enhancements, capabilities, features and benefits of LiveNX 6.0!

What You Need to Know First

The first thing you should know about LiveNX6.0 is that the new cloud-based licensing system will make managing licenses an easier process. The cloud licensing requires the Platform OVA and Internet access. The new system consists of a web-based Licensing Portal for you to retrieve information about your license key and secret. You can create accounts and share this information with your colleagues. Contact our Technical Support team at support@liveaction.com or 408-217-6501 and they will guide and assist you with the upgrade.

If you do not have Internet access from the LiveNX platform, you can continue to use the existing licensing mechanism. Please send an email to your LiveAction Technical Support Representative to obtain your traditional 6.0 license.

What Else is New?

1. Multivendor Support Enhancement

Building upon LiveAction’s strong heritage in network management, LiveNX 6.0 extends coverage to support a multivendor network environment. LiveNX discovers the network topology using SNMP. In order for the software to propagate and draw the flows correctly on the system topology, LiveNX needs to discover the IP address of the interfaces on the device. Unfortunately, not every vendor conforms to RFC1213. Some vendors have not implemented the ipAddrTable. As a result, we were not able to add the network element as an SNMP capable device.

To work around this shortcoming, we have removed the ipAddrTable check allowing a nonconforming device to be added as an SNMP capable device, thereby collecting interface statistics. We also added the capability to configure the interface IP address and mask settings to device interfaces, so that the flows can be drawn correctly. With this enhancement, you should be able to add any devices to LiveNX 6.0.

2. Shadow IT Visibility

Do you know what cloud applications are running in your network environment? Firewalls sit at the Internet edges with visibility of traffic traversing into and out of your network. They were built to recognize thousands of unique applications, so why not leverage their powerful deep packet analysis capability? Send flow data from your firewalls to LiveNX to gain visibility of what is happening on your Internet connection.

3. Site-to-Site Traffic Analysis Story

This is a new tool to analyze what is going on between sites. You can select sites of interest and find out the bandwidth and link utilizations between the selected sites. The goal is to extend attributes beyond just bandwidth and utilization in future releases. For example, you will be able to find out if there are threshold crossing alerts, DSCP values used, Service Provider information, and network latency, just to name a few.

4. Custom Dashboard

You can build your custom Network Operations Center Dashboard.

5. Web UI Reporting Enhancements

• Redesign of Scheduling Flow Reports and setting “Ends By” date for report generation. The Java client enables you to “Save Reports,” which saves a template of the parameters used in running a report, as opposed to the results of running the report. A similar capability is added to the Web UI. You can re-run any ad-hoc report. Additionally, you can make the saved report public or private. Public means all logged in users can see and run the report. Private means only the user that created it can see and run the report.
• Flex Filter
  Added the autocomplete capability similar to the Java client.
• PDF
  Added the “Print Preview” button, which will bring up a page that is better for printing or saving as a PDF.

6. Security Flow Analysis Story for Incident Response Investigation

After detecting an IT suspected incident, the next step is to determine what happened and when. The new Security Flow Analysis Story addresses the following key use cases:

• Investigate a set of internal, external IP addresses or domain names that are identified as suspicious and need further investigation.
• You have set up a honeypot to detect security risks and want to check on the interaction that has been made with it.

Start your investigation via the topological view, specifying the IP address of interest and the estimated time frame to narrow the investigation time windows.

7. Cisco IWAN Enhancements

The Bandwidth and Utilization widgets like the “App Group (DSCP) Bandwidth by Service Provider” widget shown below, now allow you to focus on end-user traffic. The WAN dashboard gives you the ability to toggle the hiding of Cisco IWAN smart probes by using the “Enable SD-WAN Control Filter.”

The “Hide SD-WAN Control” filter is shipped in this release. You can use this filter for topology and reports.

You can also correlate threshold crossing alerts (TCA) to path changes.

Here’s a sample workflow:

 

 

 

 

 

Next, run a “Corrected vs. Uncorrected” Report for the site (DC1) and DSCP traffic class “EF.”

8. Multivendor SD-WAN Support

As you evolve you traditional WAN to SD-WAN or Cisco SD-WAN, use LiveNX to help you select the pilot sites.

 

 

The WAN dashboard provides at-a-glance, the most utilized sites, and identifies which applications are taking up the most bandwidth. In this example, Seattle is probably a great site for your SD-WAN pilot.

During SD-WAN deployment, you can verify which critical applications are taking the preferred path, and verify any other traffic that is being load balanced across the Service Providers.

For ongoing monitoring, the Capacity Planning Story baselines SD-WAN usage based on link capacity, and which applications are consuming your network resources.

9. Not Equal Flex Search

You can now use != (Not equal) in your flex search. The != flex filter is supported for the following fields:

flow.protocol
flow.dscp
flow.tos
flow.app
flow.app.nbar
flow.app.custom
flow.businessRelevance
flow.trafficClass
flow.appgroup

 

10. Primary and Secondary IP Addresses Support

You now have the option to override the discovered IP address tied to network device interfaces, thereby supporting devices that have primary and secondary IP addresses on an interface. Devices with two IP addresses have been a problem in the past. In this case, the interfaces will not link together between devices.

Take advantage of all the new capabilities and features by downloading or upgrading to LiveNX 6.0.