Organisations keep migrating their workloads into the cloud but the performance and security visibility of their cloud assets fall behind. This is especially worrisome for NetOps and SecOps teams who are still responsible for ensuring a reliable and healthy network. Packet Mirroring, recently introduced by Google Cloud, enables customers to gain raw network traffic in the Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) environment and thus overcomes cloud visibility limitations. Utilizing this feature, Flowmon unlocks network traffic analysis for both performance and security reasons in Google Cloud.



“Packet Mirroring by Google Cloud is a great new feature enabling cloud traffic monitoring in the exact same way as customers are used to in the on-premise world,” says Pavel Minarik, Chief Technology Officer at Flowmon Networks. “IT teams must keep services up and running but also need to detect unusual traffic patterns that point at a security breach. With Flowmon and Packet Mirroring, this is now available for Google Cloud assets as well.”



Packet Mirroring is a virtualized equivalent of network taps. It delivers a copy of raw packet traffic to monitoring and security appliances for further analysis. Mirrored packets are sent to an Internal Load Balancer and from there to an Instance Group of one or more Flowmon Collectors with an in-built Flowmon Probe. From that point on, customers have the full power of Flowmon at their disposal with an equal level of visibility they are accustomed to from on-premise or private cloud deployments.

Fig 1: Mirroring of Google Cloud's traffic to Flowmon

With Flowmon and Packet Mirroring, customers can benefit from:

  • early threat response and reduced mean-time-to-resolution for ongoing incidents impacting application availability and data security with automated traffic analysis and threat detection,

  • actionable insights into outages and service degradations and their impact on infrastructure,

  • application performance optimization with end-user experience monitoring,

  • dynamic selection of packet mirroring sources with filters and/or tags to achieve the right balance of monitoring costs and visibility.

"Traffic visibility is critical for preventing security breaches and attacks as networks grow in complexity," said Mahesh Narayanan, product manager at Google Cloud.  “With Packet Mirroring, our customers now have a way to proactively detect network intrusions, analyze, and diagnose application performance issues for both Compute Engine and Google Kubernetes Engine, across all regions and machine types."



Flowmon is a single solution that provides tools for NetOps and SecOps alike. By adding Packet Mirroring to its feature set, it further solidifies its leadership in native cloud monitoring tools. Besides Google Cloud, Flowmon allows its customers to natively monitor Amazon VPC infrastructure and Microsoft Azure as well.



For more information, please see Flowmon blog post, Google Cloud’s VPC Packer Mirroring blog post or check Google Cloud’s VPC landing page. You can also contact us at support@flowmon.com for a trial of Flowmon in Google Cloud.