LiveAction Reviews & Insights

We use LiveNa to take in our netflow data across many sites and look for an abnormalities or issues based on the traffic patterns. It then creates a incident in our ticketing system for an engineer to review the alert. We also use it for the graphs it provides to track data usage.

LiveNA is great if you have many different sites and arent sure where data bottle necks are or how to identify other issues based on traffic usages. Its not that great if you only have a single site or have very small bandwidth sites and do not have a ton of traffic.

We used LiveAction LiveNX for a network performance analyzer. The main purpose was for packet and flow use. Though it's not as advance as Extrahop for endpoint analysis, it still gave us a good view under the hood. The main department that uses it is mainly the voice and data department.

From a packet tracing standpoint, it was easy to setup and analyze an issue we were having with eigrp errors between 2 data centers. Took a few minutes to stand up on both sides and compare the traffic to determine hellos weren't being sent. On the other spectrum, had it had the analytics of such products as Extrahop, it could have recognized and alerted us of an internal DNS attack we had.

LiveAction's LiveNX product takes the mystery out of your network by assessing your code against best practices, security recommendations, etc. However, this is not where the product functionality ends. The product takes a step by step look at your traffic, via netflow export. The traffic is sampled throughout its flow through your network and makes QOS, route, and security recommendations that can be implemented automatically, or one at a time with a point and click.

The product is best suited for performing assessments on your network infrastructure via data and voice over IP flows. Finding bandwidth hogs is also easy to do with the product (Similar to Plixer's Scrutinizer product), and permits point-and-click remediation of Quality of Service (QOS), layer2/3 transit problems, and security issues.

We use LiveAction in basically two departments, infrastructure operations (primarily in the QoS arena) and security operations (Netflow data). As the IT security manager, I use it primarily for network overview and netflow data monitoring. It is a great product to give me insight to our overall network architecture and where I can drill down to those areas I need further detail. Its ability to give me the granularity to further investigate possible security incidents is valuable.

Again, I use the product simply from a network flow perspective since security is my focus. In conjunction with a product like Wireshark, LiveAction gives me the visibility into the live data coming across our network. From what my IO Group tells me, it is a great QoS monitoring tool for day to day management.