Deployment

nLayers InSight is shipped as a self-contained appliance that is a rack-mountable server and is pre-installed with everything you need. There’s no need to purchase additional hardware or software licenses. The appliance deploys rapidly in under 60 minutes and requires minimal attention or training from your IT team.

nLayers InSight’s passive discovery engine collects data by listening to and inspecting packets on the network without scanning, spidering or probing the network. The appliance connects to a your switch via VACL definition or a “Monitoring Port” that allows it to passively observe the traffic that goes through the switch without modifying the traffic or sending new packets to your network. There is no need to install additional agent software on your servers for nLayers InSight to collect the information.

The optional nLayers InSight Active Discovery module requires minimal additional configuration depending on the Active Discovery method used. nLayers InSight’s active discovery engine is agentless and requires credentials to gather CI information remotely from the discovered servers and services. The active engine is highly configurable, allowing strict control on the servers to focus on and a flexible scheduling engine manage the frequency and times when information is gathered.

nLayers InSight was designed with scalability and performance in mind. A single nLayers InSight appliance handles connections from dozens of switches using Aggregation Switches, allowing nLayers InSight to handle thousands of applications and servers as well as tens of thousands of interdependencies. nLayers InSight can easily scale from a single department to multiple geographically distributed data centers and can easily handle hundreds of switches in the process.

nLayers InSight can also take advantage of existing traffic monitoring protocols you may already use in your environment such as RMON(2), VSPAN, RSPAN, and others. This increases the coverage the appliance provides and allows us to listen to traffic remotely without installing an appliance at geographically remote data centers.