ExtraHop introduces Open Data Stream technology

“The paradigm and promise of big data, coupled with the value it creates, demands free and unfettered access to vast volumes of data from a wide range of sources,“ said Eddie Satterly, CTO, Big Data and Analytics, Computer Sciences Corporation. “Such open access enables enterprises to freely explore, visualize, and query their data, and empowers IT to discover the type of valuable relationships and insights they require.”

Despite this important guiding principle of IT Big Data, IT Operations Analytics (ITOA) solutions have been rightfully criticized because they create restrictive silos of data that can only be accessed by a given vendor’s user interface or visualization tool. This practice limits data freedom, restricts customer choice, and inhibits the creation of valuable insight.

With this announcement, ExtraHop is expanding the means by which enterprises can achieve maximum IT and business value from their data. By combining ExtraHop wire data set with other valuable data in a highly scalable, non-proprietary database like MongoDB, or a powerful search, analytics, and data visualization suite like Elasticsearch ELK stack, customers can achieve:
• Richer and deeper insights by comparing and contrasting data from multiple sources
• Greater control over where critical ITOA data is stored and how it is queried, manipulated, and collected
• Increased flexibility of available business intelligence and analytics tools

“The most critical element and disruptive power of these (ITOA) technologies is their ability to facilitate exploration, experimentation, idea formation, and even dreaming, and the creative potential of what results,” wrote Colin Fletcher and Jonah Kowall in the June 2014 report Apply IT Operations Analytics to Broader Datasets for Greater Business Insight. “Analytics software will continue to evolve along these lines, in particular, making it easier for broader and broader audiences to linguistically and visually explore larger and larger datasets and possible correlations within.” Additionally, in a February 2014 webinar IT Operational Analytics: Big Data for the Data Center, Gartner estimated that by 2018, 25% of the Global 2000 will have deployed an ITOA platform taking data feeds from a variety of P&A systems – up from 2% in early 2014.

“ExtraHop’s wire data analytics has been a game-changer for MedSolutions. The ability to capture and visualize critical network transactions as they traverse our infrastructure has equipped us with the information we need to derive powerful insight about both our IT operations and our business,” said Tom Jansto, Enterprise Architect at MedSolutions. “ExtraHop’s new Open Data Stream capability; which we leverage along with MongoDB as our database and JSON Studios as our visualization tool, places even more valuable data at our disposal. We are now able to index and search for ad-hoc, multi-dimensional analytics and provide more granular views into application behaviors on a per transaction level. From an operations point of view, we are able to move further along our proactive model for service delivery, troubleshooting, and optimization. As for the analytics and informatics this now opens up for us, we are only now beginning to explore the depths of that wellspring.”

“The ELK stack – comprised of Elasticsearch, Logstash, and Kibana – helps thousands of businesses
worldwide extract meaningful insights out of their data in real time,” said Steven Schuurman, Elasticsearch co-founder and CEO. “The wire data that ExtraHop’s Open Data Stream can send to the ELK stack will allow businesses to combine it with other machine and human-generated operational data, helping them gain a complete picture of their business so they can draw faster, more comprehensive insights.”

“As IT big data becomes increasingly mission-critical, ITOA and wire data analytics are proving to be powerful sources of insight for IT teams and line-of-business owners,” said Jesse Rothstein, CEO and co-founder of ExtraHop. “Unfortunately, the power of this data has often been curtailed by the siloed approach taken by many ITOA vendors that limits the ways in which businesses combine, visualize, and leverage these resources. At ExtraHop, we’re in the business of helping enterprises maximize the value of their IT data, and our Open Data Stream capabilities and open IT operations architecture give users the freedom to do so.”