We’re very happy to have Front Porch as a customer - they have become some of our biggest fans and are a perfect example of how to use CloudShark on pretty much any appliance that needs to look at network traffic.
The Challenge: Leveraging Packet Captures to Support World Class IaaS
Oracle+Dyn is at the top of its game when it comes to providing Infrastructure as a Service, or IaaS. With top name clients like Twitter, Spiceworks, Etsy, and CNBC, Oracle+Dyn has made an artform out of delivering DNS, email, and remote access services across the globe. With that much responsibility, Oracle doesn’t take its job lightly. They demand quality service and assurance that any problems that arise in any one of their many remote data centers are resolved quickly and efficiently. When other means of troubleshooting fail, getting access to analyze the packets in order to root out problems immediately is critical.
“We capture abnormal traffic at our remote data centers,” said Jake McAleer, Director of Technical Operations at Oracle+Dyn. “We take the captures from those locations and perform analysis to see what the trouble is.”
“We were doing this by copying down to local machines and analyzing them in Wireshark, which can be extremely slow (especially on a Mac because using X11 is quite sluggish),” said Jake. “We needed fast and efficient analysis of packet captures.”
The Solution: CloudShark Capture Management and Web Based Analysis
Oracle+Dyn turned to CloudShark to entirely change the way they were dealing with packet captures.
“CloudShark provided a fast, central place to go for all of our capture analysis,” said Jake. “Now, we have our remote sites automatically do captures when we see something odd going on. With some easy scripts and the CloudShark API, we can immediately push those captures up to a centralized CloudShark server where we can all look at them.”
“Having it web-based means people don’t need Wireshark installed on their computers, which is saving us a significant amount of time and energy analyzing capture files,” said Jake.
Collaboration Makes Work Flow
“The CloudShark collaboration tools are really great,” said Jake. “They give us two distinct advantages: simplicity and speed. We see a problem, do a capture, upload to CloudShark where it’s tagged and sorted based on location, and start analysis with the whole team. When one person adds a filter, we can pass off that view directly to the next person just by sharing a URL.”
“Our workflow around capture analysis has become incredibly smooth.”
