HN839: Why Flows, Packets, and DDI are All Critical for Operational Effectiveness (Sponsored)

Drew Conry-Murray (0:00)

Welcome to Heavy Networking. If you've ever told someone they might not get your UDP joke, you're listening to the right podcast. I'm Drew Connery-Mahry here with my guest co-host Scott Raban, and today we're sponsored by BlueCat Networks. Now, if you think of BlueCat as an IPAM or DDI company, this episode is going to help you think again. BlueCat acquired LiveAction in 2024, and since then, they've been working to integrate LiveAction's network observability capabilities with the DDI portfolio. Today, BlueCat is here to dig into how network observability and DDI can work together to help you get faster mean time to resolution or, better yet, mean time to innocence. We'll also explore how network observability, including flow records and packet captures, can inform both your NetOps and security operations teams, how BlueCat data can support network automation initiatives, and more. Our guest is Ryan Grande, field CTO at BlueCat. Ryan, welcome to the podcast. As I mentioned, people know BlueCat as a DDI provider.

As I also mentioned, you acquired LiveAction in 2024

What does the combined portfolio offer in terms of features and capabilities to give folks sort of a sense of what we're talking about?

Ryan Grande (1:01)

So actually, I was acquired by BlueCat. From the LiveAction side of the house.

So they are a BlueCat. I mean, excuse me, BlueCat is in fact a DDI company, right? That hasn't changed with the acquisition. But it certainly changed the way that they look at all of the data as it comes together, right? Now we look at ourselves more as an Intelligent Net Ops organization than just DDI and or observability are both together.

They still have all the traditional DDI products there. They didn't get rid of anything when they made our acquisition. So you've got Integrity, which is sort of our monolithic DDI does it all, or I like to say when I'm describing it to network engineers, it's the thing. It's the thing that does all the DDI stuff.

And then we have Maestro, which is a lot of our organizations that we deal with, they don't have a monolithic DDI solution. They have all sorts of different solutions out there, or even giant companies that are doing a lot of M&A activity. They have lots of different types of DNS deployed across lots of different places all the time. So then we have Maestro, which is the thing that controls all of your DDI related things, right? So that hasn't changed. We still have some security related stuff to DNS, right? Because I like to look at DNS both as a visibility tool, and it's also a security vector. So it makes sense that we're going to have some sort of security play there. That's where Edge comes into play, sort of bridges that gap from DDI performance enhancements to actually using it as a security tool, filtering, DGA detection, stuff like that. And then the stuff that I'm kind of...

Deep in. all you're with, I guess. Yeah. This is the stuff that's near and dear to my heart. We have a product called LiveNX, which is all of our telemetry consumption, right? It's going to be eating flow in all of its flavors and making sense of it. SNMP polling, streaming telemetry consumption logs, all of that. It's the big picture of everything that's going on in the network. And then we've got Packet Capture and Analytics with LiveWire. So those are kind of the main products and probably the only ones that will come up during this conversation, I would assume. We certainly have a lot of other offerings and things like that. But whether or not it's germane and without turning it into a marketing thing, that's probably where we should stop. All right.

Scott Raban (3:17)

Let me throw just a couple of things in there. From my perspective, I host the Total Network Operations Podcast. And not to get too Orwellian on anyone, but information is power. And bringing all this data into one place certainly helps the role of the operator.

The other thing that you've said, which I'm sure we'll thread on through the conversation, is the cooperation between the knock and the sock. Like I think we need to drive for more of that in the industry. And I'd love to hear more about how you do that as we go.

Ryan Grande (3:50)

I've got a lot of opinions on that front. So it'll be an interesting conversation. So if I get a little too animated, just give me the old book and calm me down.

Scott Raban (4:01)

It's all good. We prefer animated conversations versus the ones that you need to stay awake for.

Drew Conry-Murray (4:09)