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Ixia Fabric Controller (IFC) Centralized Manager
Previously Indigo Pro, a complete, single-pane-of-glass management system for visibility products
Intro to IFC
With skyrocketing traffic volume and escalating security threats, today's networks are expanding to employ sophisticated, pervasive monitoring techniques. As networks expand and new devices are added, IT administrators need a holistic view of the network to consolidate management, ease orchestration efforts, and eliminate blind spots.
Introducing Ixia's Fabric Controller (IFC) technology — a SDx (software defined everything) controller for device management. IFC is a highly available, resilient, and easy-to-use intelligent monitoring platform that works across physical and virtual network environments to provide visibility through a single pane of glass.
What You Get With IFC Centralized Manager
Single Pane of Glass
Ixia Fabric Controller Centralized Manager (IFC Centralized Manager, previously Indigo Pro) eases your ability to configure and monitor the devices in your network whether they be taps, virtual taps, data monitoring switches, and network packet brokers from both Keysight and third-party vendors. At-a-glance dashboard views give you centralized control so that your visibility devices become fully orchestrated and coordinated monitoring resources accessible via a single platform.
IFC Centralized Manager enhancements include features such as:
- Intelligent topology display and navigation for a holistic view of your network.
- Single Sign On (SSO) capabilities to speed up login.
- Zero touch provisioning for behind-the-scenes configuration.
- IFC Cluster Integration for detailed control of racks and nodes.
Auto-Discovery and Health Monitoring
Deployment of IFC Centralized Manager is amazingly simple thanks to an automated discovery process that can quickly identify all supported Keysight Vision products, iTap/iBypass/xStream family of products, and third-party devices throughout the network. IFC reduces your workload by continuously checking for devices being added, removed, or taken offline and updating your inventory as necessary. A dynamic network topology map instantly shows the “up” or “down” status of all supported devices, in addition to custom statuses based on active alarms (Minor, Major, Critical, SNMP error).
Within the dashboard, you can drill down to obtain detailed configuration information for each device and monitor the health of all attached links. Additionally, IFC Centralized Manager monitors traffic levels and quality across the network so that issues can be resolved quickly by pinpointing the location of the error.
Reliability
IFC Centralized Manager offers a spectrum of new reliability and security features. The newly enhanced High Availability (HA) feature supports Active and Standby units in complete sync with one floating IP address; allowing instant takeover by the Standby when the Active fails. That way, your Active configuration is saved and replicated on the Standby units if an issue arises. The Active and Standby units can be either physical or virtual or a combination of both, enabling maximum deployment flexibility.
Security
The IFC Centralized Manager platform delivers a total solution to all NMS (Network Monitoring System) security-related issues. All user actions are inspected, audited against a permissions profile, and logged to an audit trail for compliance and transparency.
The system’s security is structured in four layers:
- External authentication via RADIUS and TACACS.
- Authenticated and encrypted sessions between the client web browsers and the server throughout a user’s entire sessions.
- User authentication by a login session based on a username and password.
- Role-based access control and device locking ensures that a given user can perform certain actions on specific devices with read or write permissions.
Data Visualization
IFC Centralized Manager can aid your historical trend analysis and capacity planning by gathering data in real time from discovered devices. Data is archived in a database and presented in rich graphical formats through the web browser interface.
Enhanced capabilities of the data visualization feature includes more visibility and presentation options, with an increased number of charts or dashboards per user and customizable views of interest. Each user-specific dashboard is remembered upon login so that relevant data is shown immediately.
Traffic statistics displayed include bandwidth utilization, byte and packet counts, errors, and jumbo frames, all viewable on a device-by-device basis. In addition, a dashboard can be configured to confederate the data from multiple links and devices for an at-a-glance overview of network traffic activity.
Configuration and Events Management
IFC Centralized Manager supports a scheduler that allows automated task execution across many devices so that tasks do not have to be implemented manually on each device. Common management tasks include script and policy execution, software upgrades, configuration import and export, and many more. More sophisticated mechanisms are available to allow you to execute customer scripts when one or more general device-specific events take place in the entire managed network.
IFC Centralized Manager also features event collection, including a northbound interface that forwards alerts to third-party management consoles.
Scalable
Centralized Management
Plug-and-Play
Problem: More Devices, More Monitoring Headache
The more devices on a network, the harder it is to configure and manage an entire platform. Separately monitoring network controller switches, network packet brokers, physical and virtual network taps, and third-party devices places an enormous burden on IT, and can negatively impact a technology’s return on investment.
Today’s organizations need a single management console to centrally monitor multiple devices and reduce administrative complexity.
Solution: An All-in-One Platform for Device Discovery
The IFC Centralized Manager is a unified network management system for centrally monitoring and configuring multiple devices, including network controller switches, network packet brokers, and third-party devices. Rather than manage each device separately, the platform discovers, configures, and monitors all the visibility solutions deployed on a network.
The platform’s standard interfaces allow for easy-to-understand configuration, statistics collection, and health monitoring. By automating processes such as software upgrades and configuration backups, our IFC Centralized Manager simplifies IT administrative tasks that would otherwise take days or weeks to complete. With its dramatic time and cost savings, IFC Centralized Manager offers both greater network availability and higher ROI.
Your Dashboard, Your Way
IFC Centralized Manager lets you customize your dashboard the way you see fit. Each user can choose which views of interest to display on their dashboard. Personalized views are then saved and reloaded with the next login. You can add or remove widgets or change the layout with a simple click so that the most relevant data is always displayed on your dashboard.
Related Information
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