Insight is a continuously updated database that provides the global network and security community with the data to understand how devices behave in the real world. By democratizing this data, LiveAssurance enables engineers and architects to make better decisions, and write better code.
The LiveAssurance system enables Insight by default.
How it Works
Each installation of the LiveAssurance Automation Platform collects millions of metrics in its on-going operation – from basic CPU and Memory usage to in-depth device type-specific metrics. These metrics are then analyzed by a rule engine for the generation of issues.
The Insight component of the platform collects issues, metrics and additional device data, and sends it to a central database. All of the data collected by Insight is non-confidential – it has no personally identifiable information, no company-identifying information, no devices names, and no IP addresses. This allows us to give everyone access to the data, without posing a risk to any LiveAssurance user.
Please Note that Insight requires access to “service.indeni-ops.com” over ports 80 (HTTP) and 443 (HTTPS).
LiveAssurance Overview
The top of each report gives an overview of the current license utilization, version in use, best practices followed and work hours saved.
Device Overview
Whether you are evaluating new network or security devices, or looking to lower the TCO of your existing infrastructure, with Insight you can benchmark your performance across your peers and make informed decisions.
The device overview section shows the models and versions of software used in your environment, compared to other users connected to Insight. It is a great way to know if you are in line with other users of the same devices.
Technical Architecture
Each instance of LiveAssurance contains an Insight Data Collection component which which saves non-confidential data useful to peers. When a configuration change is made in LiveAssurance, or when an issue is generated, this component saves some relevant data. The component collects only specific types of data and specific fields. It particularly selects data that we know is not confidential. This essentially follows a whitelist concept, where only safe non-confidential data will actually be collected.
The data is saved locally on the hard drive of the machine running the LiveAssurance server. Once an hour, the data is compressed and sent to a dedicated S3 bucket in Amazon Web Services (AWS). This bucket is write-only externally, which means data can only be written to it, but not retrieved from it. A series of AWS Lambda Functions are triggered when data is uploaded. They process the data, verify it, and insert it into the global MySQL database described below.