 From the SiliconANGLE Media Office in Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE. Now, here's your host, Dave Vellante. Hi everybody, welcome to this CUBE conversation. I'm Dave Vellante, and cloud and cloud migrations are a major challenge for customers. They move things into the cloud invariably. They've got things that they want to maintain on-prem. They've got to figure out what to move, how to move it, how to maintain performance and how to maintain the experience from on-prem into the cloud. Rick Krug is here as a solution architect at Netscout. Ray, thanks for coming on. It's a pleasure to be here, thank you. So tell us a little bit about Netscout. Yeah, I mean, Netscout primarily helps you provide the visibility required to protect your digital business transformation. We give you availability, information, performance information, and security insights into what's going on in your environment. We do this for 90% of the Fortune 500. We do this for 95% of service provider. So we're kind of a career class, service provider, and enterprise sophistication. And we basically give you that visibility without borders. And the visibility without borders is all about saying wherever you deploy your application, whether it's being on-prem in your private data center, software defined data center or SDN or whatever it might be, or whether you migrate some or all of that into the public cloud, AWS or Azure. We give you that same visibility, same metrics, wherever you host your application, even in this hybrid world or this multi-cloud world today. Okay, so top level, what are those discussions like you heard my intro and some of the challenges, but what are customers telling you about their cloud migrations? Well, okay, that's interesting. So Netscout have been around for ages. We're in, as I said, thousands of customers. And these guys have been tasked, they've been tasked with going to the cloud for business agility reasons. And the idea of business agility is can you sort of create new services quicker, new business initiatives, new projects, new application, new ways that customers can communicate with the business. And it's all about rapidness and delivering these applications very quickly. So the guys that we're talking to are being tasked to move it to the cloud for various reasons. It's not necessarily cost reasons as well. It's agility. And the view is of the business is the cloud will give them that agility, maybe easier to manage, maybe it's quicker to deploy applications quickly and all that sort of thing. So they've been tasked to do that. And that's a challenge because, providing that visibility on-prem and in the cloud has been historically tricky. Well, the other thing about the cloud is it's easy to test. You test things, you experiment, you fail fast, try the next one. And it's relatively inexpensive to do that versus buying infrastructure. So you see that. So talk a little bit more about some of the real challenges that customers are facing when they start that migration. As I said before, they've got on-prem, they've got workloads in the cloud, they want a consistent experience. But what are some of the problems? Yeah, I mean, yeah, that shadow IT as you call it has been a big problem. But that's business agility, isn't it? Okay, because it's taken so long to deploy stuff on-prem. Okay, it's like four days before I have a new host ready for you to do that application. So no wonder they've done that to shadow IT. But anyway, okay. So I'm tasked to migrate this application. So, okay, so I've got to understand what that application looks like. What are the components? What is it talking to? Because if I miss something, right? If I don't migrate all the components and don't forget these applications is not just one server or one component of the application. It might be 10 components, might be whatever it is. I need to know what that is. And I can't just go to the documentation team to actually see all the protocols it's talking to, all the dependencies, whether it's one app tier, talking to a database tier, or whatever it might be. The documentation just doesn't exist. And the developers who develop that application no longer are part of the company. They've long gone, if ever they've wrote any documentation. So to understand, right, what you need to migrate is one of the biggest challenges. And as it happens, it's one of the challenges that we can help in NetScout. Well, this is a huge problem because you mentioned dependencies. So if I've got, as you say, an application talking to a database and maybe an ancillary application downstream, those are going to affect business processes. And unless you understand those dependencies, if you affect one, it's going to have a ripple effect on others and it could affect the business process. So that is a critical problem. Okay, well, so how do you NetScout solve that problem? I mean, I have a question. How does the industry generally solve it? And I want to understand how you're different. Yeah, okay, so there's a couple of problems there. Is one is understanding the components, the dependencies, and then one's understanding the performance. So you can migrate successfully and all that sort of thing. Yeah, so the industry typically will actually try and use some rudimentary network data to try and take a look at one application, communicating to another and trying to get that from some devices, various devices around the network is what they'll try to do to do that. Looking for connections. Looking for connections and how they're doing that. And in terms of performance, they're resorting to looking at the different logs or the different infrastructure information like CPU utilization or those sort of things. Or developers are looking at instrumenting code into the applications, which give them that performance information. Trouble with those, they only see what the developers put into them rather than the whole picture of all those dependencies. It's a lot of bespoke data. Lot of bespoke data, trying to bring that together and come up with a conclusion that this is all the components and this is how it's performing is tricky. Okay, so how do you guys deal with it? So yeah, okay, so as you know, we use the network, the wire data in order to understand what's going on. So think about it, if an application, if I'm talking to my CRM application, I might have a web browser, it's talking to a web server, talking to an app server, to talking to a microserver, database or whatever it might be. But all of those are interactions in a network, different protocols, HTTP, HTTPS, database, Active Directory, DNS. So because we look at the network, we can see it all. So we can see all the traffic on the network, we can see how things are communicating in reality. So you don't necessarily need the documentation because we're documenting what's going on right now. And that's kind of where we really score big in terms of understanding those dependencies. And it's the secret sauce that we've always known about that NetScout has, your ability to probe the network, your layer that analyzes that data, the architecture that you've created, right? That's your IP? Yeah, that's our secret sauce. So we translate wire data, probably the wire data, there's a lot of it and it's hard to interpret. So that's one thing. So we've cured that problem by creating a patented technology called ASI, Adaptive Service Intelligence, which translates that wire data into meaningful key performance metrics. So you name the application, it's all the applications going on your network, translate them into performance metrics, let's say application performance metrics, and then differentiating, let's say application latency from network latency. So we can see whether it was a network problem, slowing things down or the application server slowing things down, but also errors. We can see all of that in that wire data. So that's that next layer up. And then we have the analytics platform, which we call Ingenious One, which actually takes that metadata and then allows us to display, okay, it's service dependency map. So this is how your application is communicating all the nooks and crannies, the things that you didn't expect, and not only does it do the dependency, it does the performance as well. Mm-hmm, the metadata always comes back to the metadata. One of the challenges that customers tell us they have is just creating the experience between on-prem and cloud, the so-called hybrid. A lot of times it's different. And they want to take that cloud experience and bring it to wherever they are, cloud A, cloud B on-prem. Are you able to maintain that experience in this hybrid model? Yeah, so to multi-cloud or not to multi-cloud. Yeah, well, yeah. No, that's the beauty of, number one, wire data and what we do. Wire data is everywhere, okay? So if your application's communicating in the cloud, it's still communicating over IP. So we can actually instrument into the cloud, collecting that wire data, and then doing the same analytics, ASI, and taking the same metadata, and actually bring together a view of now the service dependencies across the multi-cloud. So whatever the cloud, we're able to get at that wire data and translate into ASI. All uniform, it's the same metrics. Okay, so let's say we're out at a bar and you meet me and I'm an IT guy and we start chatting and I say, hey, I got this, I'm doing this big project. I'm really, you know, got this important, it's got visibility at the board level and we're moving to the cloud and it gets your attention to say, oh, that's interesting. And you start asking me, well, how are you doing that? And what do you go through? What advice would you give me? I'm open to that advice. All right, okay, yeah, no. Okay, obviously it's a talk to net scout. But the important thing is this, is that the question is that, I've got to migrate this to the cloud and all that sort of thing. It's like sort of quite scary because I don't necessarily understand the cloud. I don't realize that it's either the same or it's different or how it's performing and I'm losing that visibility. So you want to give that guy confidence. You also want to give that guy the ability to say, okay, I understand the cloud and when things go into the cloud, I can continue to monitor it because that's after all the important thing. So we give them that confidence by saying, hey, we can instrument that application when it goes to the cloud and we can instrument beforehand. So it goes in the view, understand what you're going to migrate, all the components, because you don't want to miss something, migrate it and still have that visibility when it goes into the cloud. We can give you that. We give you, this is interesting. We give you access to that wire data when there are no wires. That's to say the magic of net scout because we can instrument inside the workloads and get access to the traffic that's going in and out of those virtual machines, those EC2 instances, those virtual machines in different clouds get access to that wire data and translate it into those key performance metrics. And that's unique to net scout. How do you do that? Well, okay, so the ASI is unique and our agent technology is also unique to us to actually translate in the virtual machine, in the cloud, that wire data into metrics and then doing that all on the workload itself is very powerful. If we can't instrument in the workload, then there's another solution as well to get access to that wire data. And that's what recently people like Amazon web services and Azure have announced the ability to tap into that traffic. So Azure offer VTAP, which allows you to copy packets from a VM to a destination, which would be one of our probe technologies in the cloud. Amazon have VPC traffic mirroring to actually get access to that data as well. And we do the same thing. The point is, whether they're workloads in the cloud, workloads in the private cloud or the data center, it's the same metrics and we get that visibility end-to-end. Visibility is the key, Ray. Thanks so much for coming on theCUBE and explaining sort of your approach to cloud and multicloud. Great to have you. Thank you very much. You're welcome, all right. Thanks for watching everybody. This is Dave Vellante. Thanks for watching this CUBE conversation.