Ziften, a leader in client to cloud discovery, protection, and forensics, and LiveAction the network visualization and analytics company today announced a formal partnership to enable joint customers to easily extend visibility into typical network blind spots including local broadcast domains, wireless domains, east-west data center and public cloud traffic. With the integration of Ziften’s patent pending ZFlow and Live Action’s LiveNX™ product, joint enterprise customers can speed identification and resolution of user impacting network performance issues, improve end user experience, and reduce the time IT operations and helpdesk personnel spend on firefighting issues.

Many IT organizations have adopted NetFlow telemetry for improved network monitoring and performance management. NetFlow is inexpensive to implement, easy to collect, almost ubiquitously supported by networking equipment, and relatively easy to analyze. However, NetFlow is often generated at key networking choke points which may leave monitoring blind spots. Ziften’s ZFlow generates NetFlow data from the endpoint (user client, data center server, virtual machine, and cloud). Feeding this ZFlow data into LiveNX gives IT teams network performance visibility into these “last mile” blind spots in a single solution for the first time.

“This partnership enables our joint customers to see and manage parts of their networks that were previously out of reach,” said Darren T. Kimura, Executive Chairman, LiveAction. “The data access and additional contextual intelligence that Ziften provides, allows LiveAction users to more easily exceed their service level agreements for their internal and external business partners and users.”

Additionally, ZFlow provides enhanced flow data with valuable Layer 4-7 information connecting all flow details to device, application and user intelligence. Combined with the end-to-end intelligence delivered by LiveAction, IT users can immediately “connect the dots” on any network based alert or issue. This ability to connect network events with individual devices, specific executables, and user details allows customers to speed root cause identification and trouble resolution for performance issues, dramatically improving the overall user experience with critical applications whether hosted in private data centers or public cloud environments.

Simplifying the investigation of application and network performance issues is a major benefit for IT and end users alike. Reduced troubleshooting times gives IT and network operations personnel more time to spend on proactive trouble hunting and other value added projects that benefit business partners. And end users have more of their support issues resolved on the first call than ever before.

“Today’s IT environments are more complex than ever, and customer’s need solutions that solve difficult to address problems instead of more next-generation products,” said David Shefter, CTO, Ziften. “Improving the ability of our customers to eliminate difficult network, data center, and cloud blind spots so they can more readily solve issues for their end users and business owners is exactly the kind of vendor cooperation and problem solving customers demand.”