Organisations are caught in a constant cycle of deploying new services, supporting new use cases, and managing growth - which results in networks that are always trying to get back to a reliable state before the next round of changes hit
As a result of the network always changing there are now more monitoring, visibility, and security tools in use today than ever before. In fact, these tools are typically required today for all enterprise data centers, campus networks, as well as service provider IT, data, and LTE production networks.
To do there job correctly these tools need access to data from any point in the physical and virtual network. Some of your present-day tools often can't handle all the traffic from across the network, so we need the ability to control what information is directed to each tool, otherwise the tools will not the get the data access they need.
Another needed component to visibility is application intelligence (the ability to monitor packets based on application type and usage). This technology is the next evolution in network visibility.
Application intelligence can be used to dynamically identify all applications running on a network. Distinct signatures for known and unknown applications can be identified and captured to give network managers a complete view of their network. A well designed visibility solutions will generate additional (contextual) information such as geolocation of application usage, network user types, operating systems and browser types that are in use on the network.
Many of your tools in use only need to monitor or inspect specific types of applications. Intelligent Network Packet Brokers can easily "broker" or "deal" traffic out to monitoring and security tools by application flow. This makes your monitoring and security tools much more efficient, and it makes life much easier for administrators