>> From the SiliconANGLE media office
in Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE.
Now, here's your host, Dave Vellante.
>> Hi everybody, welcome to this Cube conversation.
I'm Dave Vellante and you know cloud and cloud migrations
are a major challenge for customers.
They move things into the Cloud,
invariably they've got things
that they want to maintain on-prem.
They've got to figure out what to move,
how to move it, how to maintain performance,
and how to maintain the experience
from on-prem into the Cloud.
Ray Krug is here, he's a solution architect at NETSCOUT.
Ray, thanks for coming on.
>> It's a pleasure to be here, thank you.
>> So tell us a little bit about NETSCOUT.
>> Yeah, I mean NETSCOUT primarily helps you
provide the visibility required
to protect your digital business transformation.
We give you availability information,
performance information and security insights
into what's going on in your environment.
We do this for 90% of the Fortune 500,
we do this for 95% of service providers,
so we're kind of carrier class, service provider,
enterprise sophistication.
And we basically give you that visibility without borders,
and the visibility without borders is all about saying,
wherever you deploy your application,
whether it be on-prem, in your private data center,
software defined data center,
Westein or whatever it might be, or whether you migrate
some or all of that into the public cloud, AWS or Azure,
we give you that same visibility, same metrics,
wherever you host your application,
even in this hybrid world or this multicloud world of today.
>> Okay, so top level, what are those discussions like?
You heard my sort of intro on some of the challenges,
but what are customers telling you
about their cloud migrations?
>> Okay, that's interesting.
So NETSCOUT have been around for ages, we're in, as I said,
thousands of customers, and these guys have been tasked,
they've been tasked with going to the cloud
for business agility reasons,
and the idea of business agility is
can you sort of create new services quicker,
new business initiatives, new projects, new applications,
new ways that customers communicate with the business.
It's all about rapidness
and delivering these applications very quickly.
So the guys that we're talking to are being tasked
to move it to the cloud for various reasons,
it's not necessarily cost reasons as well, it's agility.
And the view is, of the businesses,
the cloud will give them that agility,
maybe easier to manage, maybe it's quicker
to deploy applications quickly and all that sort of thing.
So they've been tasked to do that and that's a challenge
because providing that visibility on-prem and in the cloud
has been historically tricky.
>> Well the other thing about the cloud is it's easy to test.
You test things, you experiment, you fail fast,
try the next one and it's relatively inexpensive
to do that verus buying infrastructure.
So talk a little bit more about some of the real challenges
that customers are facing when they start that migration,
as I said before, they've got on-prem,
they've got workloads in the cloud,
they want a consistent experience,
but what are some of the problems?
>> Yeah that shadow IT as you call it has been a big problem.
But that's business agility, isn't it?
Okay, because it's taken so long to deploy stuff on-prem,
okay, it'll take four days before I have a new host
ready for you to do the applications,
so no wonder they've done that shadow IT.
But anyway, so I'm tasked to migrate this application,
so I've got to understand what our application looks like.
What are the components?
What is it talking to?
Because if I miss something, right,
if I don't migrate all the components,
and don't forget, these applications, it's not just
one server or one component to the application,
it's 10 components, whatever it is,
I need to know what that is,
and I can't just go to the documentation team
to actually see all the protocols it's talking to,
all the dependencies, whether it's one app tier
talking to a database tier or whatever it might be,
the documentation just doesn't exist.
And the developers who developed the application
no longer are part of the company, they've long gone
if ever they wrote any documentation.
So to understand, right, what you need to migrate,
is one of the biggest challenges, and as it happens,
that's one of the challenges that we can help in NETSCOUT.
>> Well, this is a huge problem,
because you mentioned dependencies,
so if I've got, as you say,
an application talking to a database,
and maybe an ancillary application downstream,
those are going to effect business processes
and unless you understand those dependencies,
if you affect one it's going to have a ripple effect on others
and it could affect the business process.
So that is a critical problem.
Okay, so how do you, NETSCOUT, solve that problem?
I have a question, how does the industry generally solve it,
and I want to understand how you're different.
>> Okay, so there's a couple of problems there.
One is understanding the components, the dependencies,
and then one's understanding the performance,
so you can migrate successfully and all that sort of thing.
Yeah, so the industry typically will actually try and use
some rudimentary network data to try and take a look
at one application communicating to another
and trying to get that from some devices,
various devices around the network,
is that they'll try to do to do that.
>> Looking for connections, essentially.
>> Looking for connections and how they're doing that,
and in terms of performance they're resorting to
looking at the different logs
or the different infrastructure information,
like CPU utilization, all those sort of things,
or developers are looking at instrumenting code
into the application which give them
that performance information.
Trouble with those, they only see what the developers
put into them rather than the whole picture
of all those dependencies.
>> It's a lot of bespoke data.
>> Lot of bespoke data, trying to bring that together,
and come up with a conclusion
that this is all the components
and this is how it's performing is tricky.
>> Okay so how do you guys deal with it?
>> So as you know, we use the network, the Y data,
in order to understand what's going on.
So think about it, if I'm talking to CRM application,
I might have a web browser, it's talking to a web server,
talking to an app server, talking to a microserver,
database, or whatever it might be,
but all of those are interactions in a network.
Different protocols, HTTP, HTPS,
database, active directory, DNS.
So because we look at the network, we can see it all.
So we can see all the traffic on the network,
we can see how things are communicating in reality.
So you don't necessarily need the documentation,
because we're documenting what's going on right now,
and that's kind of where we really score big
in terms of understanding those dependencies.
>> And it's the secret sauce that we've always known about
that NETSCOUT has, your ability to probe the network,
your layer that analyzes that data,
the architecture that you've created.
Right, that's your IP?
>> Yeah that's our secret sauce.
So we translate Y data, trouble is Y data,
there's a lot of it and it's hard to interpret,
so that's one thing, so we've cured that problem
by creating a patented technology called ASI,
adaptive service intelligence, which translates that Y data
into meaningful key performance metrics.
So you name the application,
all the applications, going on your network,
translate them into performance metrics,
let's say application performance metrics,
and then differentiating, let's say, application latency
from network latency, so we can see whether it was
a network problem slowing things down,
or the application server slowing things down,
but also errors, we can see all of that in that Y data.
So that's that next layer up, and then we have
the analytics platform, which we call InGenius One,
which actually takes that metadata and then allows us
to display, okay, the service dependency map.
So this is how your application is communicating,
all the nooks and crannies,
the things that you didn't expect,
and not only does it do the dependency,
it does the performance as well.
>> The metadata, it always comes back to the metadata.
One of the challenges that customers tell us they have
is just creating the experience between on-prem and cloud,
the so-called hybrid.
A lot of times it's different,
and they want to take that cloud experience and bring it
to wherever they are, cloud A, cloud B, on-prem.
Are you able to maintain that experience
in this hybrid model?
>> Yeah, so to multi-cloud or not to multi-cloud.
That's the beauty of, number one, Y data and what we do.
Y data is everywhere, so if your application's communicating
in the cloud, it's still communicating over IP,
and so we can actually instrument into the cloud,
collecting that Y data, and then doing the same analytics,
ASI, and taking the same metadata,
and actually bring together a view of,
now the server's dependencies across the multi-cloud.
So whatever the cloud, we're able to get at that Y data,
and translate it into ASI.
All uniform, it's the same metrics.
>> Okay, so let's say we're out at a bar and you meet me
and I'm an IT guy and we start chatting and I say,
hey I'm doing this big project, I've got this important,
it's got visibility at the board level
and we're moving to the cloud, and get your attention
and say, huh, that's interesting, and you start asking me,
how are you doing that, what are you going through,
what advice would you give me?
I'm open to that advice.
>> Obviously it's talk to NETSCOUT,
but the important thing is this.
The question is that, I've got to migrate this to the cloud
and all that sort of thing, and it's sort of quite scary
because I don't necessarily understand the cloud,
I don't realize that it's either the same or it's different
or how it's performing, and I'm losing that visibility,
so you want to give that guy confidence.
You also want to give that guy the ability to say,
okay, I understand the cloud,
and when things are in the cloud,
I can continue to monitor it,
'cause that's, after all, the important thing.
So we give them that confidence by saying hey,
we can instrument that application when it goes to the cloud
and we can instrument beforehand, so it goes in the view,
understand what you're going to migrate,
all the components 'cause you don't want to miss something,
migrate it and still have that visibility
when it goes into the cloud.
We can give you that.
We can give you, and this is interesting,
we give you access to that Y data when there are no Ys.
That's, to say, the magic of NETSCOUT
'cause we can instrument inside the workloads
and get access to the traffic that's going in and out
of those virtual machines, those EC2 instances,
those virtual machines in different clouds,
get access to that Y data and translate it
into those key performance metrics.
>> And that's unique to NETSCOUT?
How do you do that?
>> Well, the ASI is unique and our agent technology
is also unique to us to actually translate
in the virtual machine, in the cloud,
that Y data into metrics, and then doing that
all on the workload itself is very powerful.
If we can't instrument in the workload
then there's another solution as well
to get access to that Y data and that's what recently,
people like Amazon and web services
and Azure have announced the ability
to tap into that traffic, so Azure offer V-tap,
which allows you to copy packets from VM to a destination,
which would be one of our probe technologies in the cloud.
Amazon have the VPC traffic mirroring to actually get access
to that data as well, and we do the same thing.
The point is, whether they're workloads in the cloud,
workloads in the private cloud or the data center,
it's the same metrics and we get that visibility end to end.
>> Visibility's the key.
Ray, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE
and explaining your approach to cloud and multi-cloud.
>> Great, thank you very much.
>> You're welcome.
All right, thanks for watching everybody.
>> This is Dave Vellante.
Thanks for watching this Cube conversation.
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