Deploying a Sinefa Probe in your Environment

Sinefa is a cloud service that requires a Sinefa Hardware Probe or Sinefa Software Probe inside the network to collect traffic. 

Overview
When to Deploy a Hardware Probe
When to Deploy a Software Probe
How to determine where to place the probe on your network - In-line
Out-of-Path Setup
How to determine what subscription is best suited for your environment

When to deploy a Hardware Probe

• During a trial or Proof of Concept of the Sinefa technology
• When an easy deployment is required (hardware can reduce the complexity of deployment as you may not have infrastructure in each location to install software)
• When infrastructure to install software is not available or you cannot span/mirror network traffic

See Quick Start Guide: Physical Probe Set-up

When to deploy a Software Probe

Software Probes can be deployed on almost any Virtual Host or Linux Host (see supported environments).

How to determine where to place the probe on your network 

Where you place the Sinefa probe on your network is crucial for the probe to function plus for the features you want to utilize with our service.
For example, if you are requiring Network Quality Scores, this will not work on a probe that has been set-up out-of-path.

In-Line Set-up

Above is a basic network set-up which includes your WAN link, your router, a Sinefa Probe set-up in-line and a switch. This is the default set-up for a probe and is more along the lines of a "minimal config" device without requiring any additional set-ups such as a SPAN/Mirror port.

This is where the Sinefa Probe acts like a TAP device where it passes through traffic from the WAN facing device to the WAN1 interface, through to the LAN1 interface, then to the switch without any performance hinderance while also sending analysis to the Sinefa cloud to compile the statistics into a visual report.

For a physical probe, this is a required set-up to enable Traffic Shaping and NQS.

Out-of-Path Set-up

Above is a basic network set-up which includes a WAN link, a router, a switch and a Sinefa probe set-up out-of-path. This set-up is suited if you are unable to set-up a probe in-line for various reasons. With out-of-path set-ups, you will not be able to set-up Traffic Shaping policies.

How this works is you have a port set-up on the switch with SPAN/Mirror which then imitates the traffic that's being generated and forwarding it to the WAN1 port on the Sinefa Probe for analysis. The statistics are then forwarded onto the Sinefa Cloud for the visual reports to be compiled. The Management port is purely for the Probe to obtain an IP address so it can communicate with the Sinefa Portal.

The reason LAN1 can't be connected is so that a network loop is avoided as it is part of a bridge set-up with WAN1. This is where traffic flows through WAN1 from the switch then flows back out LAN1 and creates network collisions which in turn can cause a network outage (if the switch hasn't had configuration put in place to avoid a situation like this).

This is also a common set-up for a Virtual Probe.

How to determine what subscription is best suited for your environment

As well as placement of the probe, you need to keep in mind the bandwidth of the WAN link(s) you have in place. So for example, if the total bandwidth on your link(s) is 15MBps throughput with no plans to upgrade that link anytime in the near future, a 100mbps subscription is best suited for you.

Your LAN NICs on your networking appliances (i.e. on switches) do not determine what type of probe subscription you require. If you have switches with 1GBps NICs available but an 15mbps WAN link, you will not require a 1GBps subscription as the switch's ports do not have an effect, that's an indication what they are capable of with the right resources.

If you however have WAN link(s) in place exceeding 100MBps throughput in total, that's when you will need to look at the 1GBps subscription (and an SF801 probe if you're looking at the hardware option, Virtual Probes can be set-up on a 1GBps subscription as well).

What Next?
How it Works
Pre-installation Checklist
Sinefa Best Practise Guide
Sinefa's 5-minute User Interface Demo