Introducing the Axoflow Use Case Blog Series
My name is Mark Bonsack, and I am the director of Sales Engineering at Axoflow. As we have developed Axoflow in the past years, very interesting use cases have arisen. Many of these use cases resolve years of challenges, most of which I have experienced personally when working with both legacy and cloud-native telemetry architectures, while others are truly new, innovative ideas that the Axoflow platform enables.
We present the use cases as a series of short blog posts and videos. If there are any ancillary blogs or other relevant material (docs, etc.) those will be included. We’ll keep adding use cases continually, so come back to stay current with recent developments, or follow us Linkedin!
If you have a use case that you would like to see explored, please do let us know!
Monitoring Data Loss
One of the most common requests we’ve fielded while developing Axoflow is the capability to monitor for data loss, both as:
- packet loss on input, and
- log or event loss on output.
The Axoflow Console provides a very simple way to quickly drill down on infrastructure that’s losing data, and full alerting is provided for a number of data loss scenarios.
Telemetry pipelines present a unique challenge for data loss, as many of the protocols in use are decades old, and the amount of data transferred stretches the limits of the pipeline itself and associated network infrastructure. One of the most common protocols, syslog, is particularly vulnerable to data loss due to its “send and forget” nature (lack of application acknowledgment) as well as atomic payloads (where in many cases each event stands on its own, with no context from other events surrounding it). Therefore, data loss is particularly difficult to detect, because if a packet goes missing, the others (both before and after) will not look out of place without the missing data, and the data stream will look “normal”. I have experienced large enterprises having upwards of 20% or more data loss with this kind of data.
Check out the attached video to see how easy it is to gain visibility into dropped data, both on the input and output side of the aggregator.
For more information on Data Loss and techniques to detect it, see the following deep-dive blogs:
To learn more about Axoflow Console, check out the other videos in this series:
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We are excited to be realizing our vision above with a full Axoflow product suite.
