Not Just for Security

Security seems to be getting all the attention these days. How can it not, with recent headlines such as the data breach the University of Florida suffered that put 333,000 patient records at risk or the 33,000 Halifax Health patients that were notified that their personal information was at risk for identity fraud due to a system intrusion. The need to counteract and prevent such breaches with robust tools (such as NetIntercept) is a no-brainer.

But there are other uses for network monitoring and network forensics tools that have been gaining ground lately. One of those uses is for developers who want to see what their code is actually doing across the network by watching and viewing the traffic right down to the packet level. Another use for NetIntercept is in the operations area for the folks who need to manage and monitor their sometimes humungous networks.

I talked to one developer recently who was interested in using NetIntercept to increase his productivity of writing code for a computer gaming company. He wanted to monitor the UDP and TCP messages going back and forth between the client and the server, check to make sure his code was working properly and that the response he was getting is what he expected. He told me that the biggest value he saw in NetIntercept was that you can see the actual contents of the packets, not just the headers (as is the case for most tools in the market today.) Being able to view the traffic right down to the packet level gives you the actual data, including the contents of files. It also protects the data from being "spoofed" and will actually show you that it was spoofed in the first place!

One of our biggest customers is using NetIntercept to monitor their service level agreements. They are a large phone company that services many users while also employing outside services from many other sources. NetIntercept enables them to monitor all of these services that are interacting across their network and ultimately servicing their customers. It gives the operations folks peace of mind knowing they can quickly and accurately troubleshoot any problems on their network.

While NetIntercept is classified as a Network Forensics appliance, its usefulness to developers and network operations makes it just as valuable as it is to threatened security.