DANZ Monitoring Fabric

Formerly Big Switch BMF

DANZ Monitoring Fabric (DMF) is a network packet broker (NPB) developed by Arista Networks, Inc. It aims to provide pervasive, organization-wide visibility and security. According to the vendor, DMF offers multi-tenant monitoring-as-a-service, enabling IT operators to monitor user, device/IoT, and application traffic across physical, virtual, and container environments. The product is suitable for organizations of various sizes, including small to large enterprises. IT operations professionals, network administrators, security analysts, cloud service providers, and telecom operators can benefit from DMF's deep visibility, troubleshooting capabilities, and security analytics to optimize network performance and ensure compliance.

Dynamic VM Monitoring: DMF enables real-time monitoring of virtual machine (VM) traffic, providing visibility into virtualized environments. It supports automatic discovery and provisioning of VMs for seamless monitoring, helping identify and troubleshoot performance issues within virtualized environments.

Comprehensive Network Visibility: DMF provides deep visibility into network traffic, allowing network administrators to monitor and analyze user, device/IoT, and application traffic across physical, virtual, and container environments. This enables effective troubleshooting, optimization of network performance, and compliance with security policies.

Flow Intelligence and Security Analytics: DMF offers flow intelligence and security analytics capabilities, empowering security analysts to detect and investigate security threats and anomalies. This includes features such as traffic filtering, metadata extraction, and real-time threat detection.

Multi-Tenancy and Delegated Administration: DMF supports multi-tenancy, enabling cloud service providers to offer monitoring-as-a-service to their customers. It also facilitates delegated administration, allowing different teams or departments within an organization to have their own monitoring policies and access controls.

Support for 4G/5G Mobile Networks: DMF is relevant for telecom operators who need to monitor and secure their network infrastructure, as it provides visibility into mobile traffic. This helps optimize network performance and ensures the security of mobile networks.

Intelligent Traffic Filtering: DMF offers intelligent traffic filtering capabilities, allowing users to filter and forward specific traffic based on criteria such as source/destination IP, port, protocol, or application. This enables efficient use of monitoring resources and reduces unnecessary data processing.

Packet Slicing and Deduplication: DMF provides packet slicing and deduplication features, reducing the size of captured packets and removing duplicates. This optimizes storage and processing resources, ensuring efficient analysis of network traffic.

Flexible Deployment Options: DMF supports flexible deployment options, including physical appliances, virtual machines, and containers. This allows organizations to choose the deployment model that best suits their infrastructure and operational requirements.

Integration with Third-Party Tools: DMF seamlessly integrates with a wide range of third-party tools and platforms, such as network performance monitoring (NPM) tools, security information and event management (SIEM) systems, and analytics platforms. This enables organizations to leverage their existing investments and enhance their monitoring and security capabilities.

Centralized Management and Control: DMF provides centralized management and control of monitoring policies, configurations, and access controls. It offers a user-friendly interface for easy configuration and monitoring of the entire DMF deployment, ensuring efficient management of monitoring resources across the organization.