Keysight Technologies, Inc. today announced Ixia CloudLens Self-Hosted 5.1, a new version of the company's private cloud visibility platform which offers enterprises and service providers packet-level visibility into restricted cloud environments by enabling East-West traffic monitoring.

Traditional methods of network monitoring present challenges to network operations and security teams responsible for private clouds and data centers. These challenges are due to limited or no access to packet-level data between virtual machines (VM), or containers in cloud environments. A recent Ixia survey, The State of Cloud Monitoring, found that IT professionals see a direct connection between access to packet data and their ability to maintain cloud security and performance. The survey revealed 87 percent of respondents expressed fears that a lack of cloud visibility is obscuring security threats to their organization, while 95 percent of respondents said visibility problems had led them to experience an application or network performance issue.

"Today's network operations and security teams struggle to gain packet-level visibility into restricted cloud environments, and the addition of containers to virtual traffic increases that challenge," said Scott Register, vice president, product management of Keysight's Ixia Solutions Group. "CloudLens Self-Hosted 5.1 enhances visibility into virtual traffic, including containers in private clouds and data centers - enabling customers to clearly identify potential security threats and ensure optimal network and application performance."

Ixia's platform for private, public and hybrid cloud visibility, CloudLens, enables packet capture, as well as filtering and analysis in any cloud environment, eliminating blind spots and delivering actionable intelligence to security, analytics, and forensics tools. CloudLens Self-Hosted 5.1, formerly CloudLens Private, bridges the gap between cloud and physical networks by extending complete visibility to virtualized environments and inter-virtual workloads. It features:

• virtual taps that enable monitoring of Kubernetes inter-Pod traffic in container environments, as well as VM to VM monitoring to gain packet-level access to network data
• filtering at the source, as the only platform that aggregates, filters, and processes packets virtually to save bandwidth and reduce latency
• a platform-agnostic environment that supports VMware, Microsoft, OpenStack, and KVM (Kernel-based Virtual Machine) hypervisors, as well as Kubernetes for deployment flexibility
• an integrated CloudLens Sensor Management Platform which enables seamless management in the private cloud/data center from the CloudLens Manager