SaaS J-Flow Collectors

Overview of SaaS J-Flow Collectors

The market has embraced SaaS as a delivery model for advanced products and capabilities and its now possible to apply this cost effective approach to network traffic visibility and analytics solutions. J-Flow Collectors and Analysis functions fit very well into a SaaS deployment model and it scales on-demand for enterprises, web service providers, and service providers of all sizes. 

SaaS J-Flow Collectors are deployed in a public cloud. Enterprises, web services companies, and service providers can readily export J-Flow data in a secure connection to cloud-based J-Flow Collector resources. This in combination with J-Flow Analysis resources enables a multi-tenant SaaS approach to J-Flow analysis.  This enables network operators to go from registration to production use flow data analysis analysis capabilities in tens of minutes with no hardware required.  This freedom from capital and related operations costs, and the fast time to value is highly attractive to IT management. 

Benefits of SaaS-Based J-Flow Collectors

The primary benefits for operators utilizing SaaS-based J-Flow Collectors are: 

• The cloud-based SaaS model cost effectively scales to meet volume and data retention needs from early stage network deployments through full, large-scale network coverage as network capacities increase. 
• Ensures “day 0” time to value by eliminating the need for hardware, and provides instant compatibility and integration with J-Flow-enabled devices from many different network equipment providers. 
• Avoids investing in on-premises J-Flow Collector capabilities that become obsolete as back-end technology and methods change. 
• Achieves real-time network visibility for real-time problem resolution. 
• Eliminates capital and related operations investments such as space, power, cooling and staffing required to maintain hardware and software. 

This last benefit is a key reason for operators to utilize a SaaS-based J-Flow Collectors versus building one in-house. An in-house deployment results in up-front investments and continuing, long-term resource allocations that can skew long-term total cost of ownership (TCO) higher than a SaaS-based service. Much of the internal build cost equation involves deployment, configuration, and ongoing maintenance of the software performed by internal staff along with the cost of hardware to deploy it.  Also, SaaS-based Netflow Collectors inherently scaled-out versus an in-house effort from the moment it is turned up, eliminating unforeseen capital spending or poor analysis performance. 

Kentik is the first to create a purpose-built big data, SaaS platform for J-Flow Analysis utilizing a Big Data approach for resourcing J-Flow Collectors. Kentik’s commercially-proven J-Flow SaaS analysis environment ingests tens of billions of flow records per day. Kentik SaaS-based customers can leverage the power of a scale-out analysis engine, allowing them to perform multi-dimensional, ad-hoc traffic analyses and get answers in a few seconds. Kentik also supports flexible, network-wide DDoS and anomaly detection, network planning and intuitive BGP peering analytics visualizations. 

More Reading

To learn more about the trade-offs of SaaS versus traditional NetFlow, sFlow, IPFIX, and J-Flow analysis solutions, see Jim Frey’s blog post:

The Stirring Simplicity of SaaS for Network Visibility

To learn more about Kentik’s SaaS Big Data J-Flow analysis, network performance monitoring and DDoS protection solution, visit the Kentik Detect product page.