Keysight Technologies announced it has extended the Ixia CloudLens visibility platform to offer packet-level visibility into workloads in containers and Kubernetes clusters.

Containers are becoming more popular in cloud environments. Gartner reports that "container popularity will continually increase over the next 18 to 24 months." Gartner also finds that "by 2020, more than 50 percent of global enterprises will be running containerized applications in production, up from less than 20 percent today." In addition, as enterprises run applications on physical hardware, virtualized platforms, in public cloud infrastructures and Kubernetes containers clusters, they expand the cloud attack surface.

Ixia CloudLens, a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solution available online 24/7, delivers end-to-end cloud visibility. CloudLens is the first and only solution on the market today to deliver packet visibility into containers and Kubernetes clusters across cloud platforms including AWS Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes (EKS), Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) and Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE).

"The lack of granular access to cloud traffic creates blind spots which could compromise application performance or security, resulting in degraded customer experience and increased network security risk," said Scott Register, vice president, product management for Keysight's Ixia Solutions Group. "By expanding CloudLens support to containers, we offer the packet-level visibility that security and network teams need to diagnose critical security and performance issues in their container-based environments all in one platform."

The CloudLens platform was designed from the ground up to retain the benefits of the cloud - elastic scale, flexibility, and agility, while enabling security, analytics, and forensics tools to acquire the needed packet-level data. Now, CloudLens enables packet visibility into workloads on physical, virtual, cloud, container or in Kubernetes clusters maximizing the organization's existing investment in Application Performance Management (APM), Network Performance Management (NPM) and Intrusion Detection (IDS) tools.

CloudLens helps customers gain visibility into containers and Kubernetes environments on the same host or across hosts - by providing traffic forwarding to cloud monitoring and security tools to proactively detect intrusions and analyze security threats. Its unique GUI allows users to easily set-up and manage their cloud monitoring environment for any cloud and Kubernetes cluster from a single pane of glass.