IPv6, Secure and Private AI are both upon us, and Cohesive Networks is delivering into those areas with the same practical approach we have used for Public and Private Cloud all these years.
Moving to IPv6 – herein lies madness (Part 1)
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Follow the Bouncing Ball; Finding Your Packets
One of the great strengths of VNS3 has always been the ease with which you can look at your network traffic, a necessity for troubleshooting connectivity issues or attesting to correct packet flow. With our release of VNS3 5.0 we have added some big functional improvements that make our network sniffer even better.
Where as the network sniffer used to run in a single user, single process mode, you can now run multiple captures in multiple web sessions. This is extremely helpful when multiple people are logged into a controller diagnosing issues together or you want to flip back and forth between two captures running simultaneously. In addition all filtered expressions are now saved so that they can be rerun in the future. You don’t have to reacquaint yourself with filter syntax every time.
Another big improvement is the ability to run a capture across all interfaces. This new functionality allows you to follow a packet, for example, coming off of a IPSec tunnel, up to a container running a proxy load balancer and out to a compute host connected via the encrypted overlay network. This operation would look at three interfaces, eth0, plugin0 and tun0. This is really helpful when observing the full path of your packets.
If you want to take the output of your captures and analyze them in other tools we now provide you the ability to download your captures in pcap format so that you can read them into your preferred network analysis tool or SIEM. There are a number of free online tools like apackets.com or opensource projects like wireshark and tshark that you can use.
One more improvement that we have made is that all captures will automatically terminate after onehour of running. Previously captures would run until you purposefully stopped them. That ran the risk of over logging and some reduction in performance. Much easier to stop them automatically after a reasonable hour than to have to remember to manually do so.
Ultimately a network device is only as good as the visibility it provides. We at Cohesive Networks strive to provide as much insight as possible and the user experience to make it as simple as possible.
Enhanced VPN Monitoring With VNS3
Cloud VPN Monitoring
Monitoring your VPN connections is essential in today’s interconnected world. Having the ability to quickly react to network interruptions is paramount to business continuity. At Cohesive Networks we have developed a range of new features to keep you one step ahead.
VNS3 Alerts
Our VNS3 Network Security Appliance has prebuilt alerts that talk to all your favourite collaboration tools, including Slack, Webex Teams, AWS SNS, Opsgenie, PagerDuty, and our own VPN monitoring appliance VNS3:ms (or ‘MotherShip’ as it’s known around here).
If there isn’t a pre-built template for your monitoring application, you can leverage our Alerts Integrations to send customised payloads to any incoming webhook API that’s listening for an update.
Our ever-growing list of alerts now encompasses administrative actions carried out on your VNS3 Network Security Appliance, including password changes, controller reboots, and system resets, as well as monitoring your VPN connection ups and downs.
Configuring Alerts
Configuring alerts is a straightforward process with our pre-built templates. You can try them for free in your favorite public cloud with our VNS3 Free Edition. To get started visit our docs site here: https://docs.cohesive.net/tutorials/getting-started/.
Here we are going to set up alerts to Slack,
- Find the “Alerts” menu item in the Web UI
- Click “New Alert”, to bring up the setting page
- From the Integration dropdown select (Prebuilt) Slack
- Give your alert a Name
- Enter your Slack App Notification URL (you will need to create a Slack App). Once you have done that, you will get the Webhook URL ( https://api.slack.com/start )
- Highlight all the things you want to be notified about in the Events window
- Ensure the alert is Enabled
And you’re done!
Conclusion
VNS3 Alerts are quick and easy to set up, improve visibility, and keep you one step ahead of your VPN monitoring requirements. If you want to know more about VNS3 and it’s capabilities reach out at https://cohesiveprod.wpenginepowered.com/contact.
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