Context Matters: The Power of Enriched Flow Data for Modern Networks

Imagine you’re a network engineer starting a new position. During onboarding, a seasoned engineer walks you through the company’s network monitoring solution, pointing out the typical “network tribal knowledge.”

“This IP address is the load balancer for the application servers of our DAS app… 

This one belongs to the database server…

And here is the firewall for our Denver branch office, which handles all L2VPN traffic.…”

You pause and ask if this information is documented somewhere—and if that documentation is up to date. But, if you’re honest with yourself, you already know the answer: no.

If you’ve ever been in a similar situation, you know how important business context is when using an observability platform. Wouldn’t life be a lot simpler if all network traffic were tagged with “DAS load balancer,” “DAS database,” or “L2VPN firewall Denver?” Fortunately, it’s possible to reduce tribal knowledge and address the related challenges by taking a different approach to network observability. 

How to Reduce Tribal Knowledge 

Every network is unique, and no documentation is extensive enough to capture everything NetOps engineers need to be successful at their jobs. While numbers vary between studies, it is safe to assume that more than half of all network outages result from device misconfiguration, and most misconfigurations result from knowledge gaps. 

By enriching network traffic data with business context, all stakeholders can gain clarity about what they’re viewing. This shared understanding reduces the reliance on tribal knowledge, prevents costly misconfigurations, accelerates mean time to remediation (MTTR), and empowers a broader audience to interpret network data effectively.

Another benefit of enriching data is the ability to tag network traffic with the physical location of clients or servers, such as a specific building or data center. This improves situational awareness. For instance, if a particular building experiences connectivity issues, enriched data can quickly identify affected services and users, facilitating targeted troubleshooting and minimizing downtime.

Democratizing Network Observability

If tribal knowledge is a roadblock to efficient network monitoring within network teams, this challenge only intensifies when individuals outside the team need access to network traffic data. Formal data requests often lead to long wait times and even longer resolution times for outages and other incidents.

When network traffic data is enriched with business context, such as application names, DevOps teams can log in to the network observability platform, filter traffic by application, and quickly determine whether an issue is caused by a slow network—without needing to contact the network team directly. 

SecOps teams need network traffic data to evaluate alerts and indicators of compromise (IoCs). Enriched network traffic can be the difference between a security analyst spending hours reviewing logs or quickly identifying that a known actor or application caused an anomaly.

Enriching flow data provides your operations teams with the tools required to handle the problems they face daily. The benefit, however, extends beyond the NetOps team. Other operational teams can access the network information they need when they need it.

Achieving Comprehensive Contextual Enrichment

Beyond business-specific information, integrating additional context sources is important for comprehensive network insights:

• DNS Information: Translating IP addresses into human-readable names simplifies the identification of traffic sources and destinations.

• Cloud Metadata: In hybrid environments, associating traffic with specific cloud instances or services aids in monitoring and managing cloud resources effectively.

• Application Data: Understanding which applications generate or receive traffic allows for better performance monitoring, troubleshooting, and security assessments.

• Geolocation Data: Identifying the geographical origin or destination of traffic assists in detecting anomalies, such as unexpected international connections. This capability also plays a major role in setting automated compliance alerts.

• Threat Intelligence: Enriching data with threat intelligence enables the identification of malicious activity, enhancing security measures and reducing the time SecOps teams spend hunting down threats.

• Client-Server Relationships: Mapping network traffic not just with a source and destination but also with clients and servers provides a clear view of network dependencies and potential points of failure.

ElastiFlow’s Comprehensive Enrichment Capabilities

ElastiFlow NetObserv excels in enriching flow records through a wide array of contextual information, including business context, DNS, cloud metadata, application details, geolocation, threat intelligence, client-server relationships and others. 

Designed for scalability, NetObserv supports enriching network traffic even at rates exceeding one million flow records per second, ensuring it can handle the demands of the largest and most complex networks. ElastiFlow empowers organizations to achieve true network observability by providing enriched, high-volume data processing, facilitating proactive management, and enhancing security.

Getting started with ElastiFlow takes only minutes, and we offer a 30-day free trial. Visit our subscription page for more details.