Containerized Visibility Fabric (CVF)

Cloud-native observability platform

A cloud native network function (CNF) designed to handle the challenges of gaining insight into virtual/cloud resources where topology, interfaces and data flows are hidden. Observability is no longer just logs, metrics and traces, but streaming, real-time, network event metadata from the kernel level by employing eBPF. Leveraging a lightweight microservices architecture, the CVF can be deployed quickly (and at-scale) to do more than capture packets.

This composable visibility solution goes beyond capturing packets to generate rich metadata containing:

raw or filtered protocol specific traffic , encrypted and/or plain text traffic
more granular and advance cloud native flow records
remotely and programmatically capture and publish packet traffic
link, interface, and topology descriptors
encrypted session metadata (protocol version, client & server random, compression method, session id, supported cipher suites, extensions).

The CVF is comprised of agents and controller that feeds streaming network data to a message queue. The message queue is used for management of the agents as well as the egress point for all data coming out of the CVF agents.

Watch the Containerized Visibility Fabric Overview

How the Containerized Visibility Fabric works

The CVF application is a lightweight piece of code that communicates safely with the bare-metal operating system, deployed as a container in cloud-native environments. The CVF application is managed either as a Daemonset or Replicaset within the Kubernetes / cloud environment to ensure scalability, consistency, and maintainability.

The power of CVF lies in the fact that it allows for deep observability and control: from individual machines (bare-metal OS) to across an entire cloud infrastructure; core-to-edge. Furthermore, the CVF architecture is flexible, extensible, and open: CVF compute engines can be updated on-the-fly, new functional capabilities can be added with plug-ins, and communications are provided via an open standards distributed messaging queue / publish-subscribe architecture.

The CVF is comprised of two main components, "agent(s)" and the "controller" that publish to a message queue:

Agents are lightweight network sensors that can accomplish a variety of network visibility functions, these functions are referred to as "tasks". Agents also include native tapping capabilities for autodiscovery of all containers, infrastructure, and interfaces.

Controller-MantisNet-A The controller is a container that manages multiple agents within an environment- providing configuration and provisioning control, as well as instructing the agents what their current "directive" is. A directive is a combination of one or more tasks that are to be performed by the agent.

Simplified Deployment and Pricing

MantisNet licensing is sized and scaled to meet the current and future demands of the enterprise:

Licensing is based on the specific cloud instance, and the type and number of total sensors required
Pricing scales with performance and processing demands.
Performance is based on the specific instance and availability of resources (network bandwidth, number of CPU cores/memory) allocated as well as the resource demands of the traffic of interest and the licensed protocol transcoders.
Provides predictable lifecycle upgrades by offering support for up to two major software releases*

Complete Network visibility