Tech Bytes: How Statseeker Delivers Critical Network Intelligence (Sponsored)

Today on the TechBites podcast, we hear from StatSeeker.

This is a network monitoring company that collects high fidelity network data to help engineers

that administer to get visibility into physical, virtual, and logical interfaces to find problems

faster, understand root causes, and spot behaviors and anomalies so that you can prevent problems

instead of just reacting to them. We're going to explore how StatSeeker works here,

customer use cases, and find out how StatSeeker differentiates itself from other network monitoring

products. Our guests are Dylan Hensler, customer solution specialist, and Andrew Greenlaw,

technical account manager. Dylan and Andrew, welcome to the podcast.

And Andrew, we'll start your first. Just give us a quick overview of StatSeeker.

Thanks, Drew. So StatSeeker is a self-hosted platform for monitoring critical networks,

some performance metrics, and events like you spoke about. It's really around real-time

troubleshooting, but then also that piece around the historical analysis, long-term reporting

that StatSeeker is kind of known for. It's an on-premise solution, so there's a lot of flexibility

options for how it can be hosted. We've got customers that still have this in physical and

virtual environments, but then have moved into more Azure, AWS, Google Cloud, I've even had

customers push this into Nutanix and things like that. So it really kind of gives customers the

option to place this where they want and kind of control and manage that data themselves, not bound

by a SAS solution. This is their data. So it doesn't need an army of pullers, it doesn't

need separate databases that you're managing. Everything comes completely housed inside StatSeeker,

so it really is a smart, highly efficient data collector or a range of different network sizes.

So we go up to the super large, but we also play in the small and medium-sized networks as well.

Well, Andrew, StatSeeker has been around a long time. We've done work with you as Packer

Pusher is going back. Maybe a decade. You've been around a long time, but the thing I remember

about StatSeeker from back in the day was you guys could ingest a stupid ridiculous crazy

amount of telemetry and handle it. And like you were saying, without having to have 50 pullers

out there to build the scale, is that still the thing? Yeah, that's still very much kind of who we are

and what we do. And you say a decade, but we've been kind of around in this kind of space for

gone past 25 years now. This is our kind of bread and butter network performance monitoring.

We've kind of seen a lot of change in the environment and the kind of the evolution of networks,

but definitely that whole value around data, data collection, large, big data play,

that's kind of who StatSeeker is, and that's very much what we do. But regardless of kind of

the change in where the data sits and things like that. So, yep, definitely. Let's dive into what

kind of data are we talking about? Foundation of what StatSeeker is looking at is just your

classic network metrics, device and interface performance and health stats. We're primarily

collecting those over SNMP. And we're also doing reachability and event and latency signals via

ICMP. So, very open protocols. We tried, which will just support almost any network device out there.

For discovery, it's all IP range driven. And then configuration and inventory details give

you refreshed over time through your scheduled re-walk. So, the system is going to stay aligned with

that with what's actually on your network automatically. That's a key thing for us. So,

you set StatSeeker up and it run a lot of it can be automated in the background and it maintains

itself. There's not a lot of day-to-day maintenance or configuration to do. On top of that,

StatSeeker can work with event data like CISLOG, SNMP traps for alerting and troubleshooting.

It also supports integrations where the data source is a vendor API. CISCO ACI or

Moroccchi integration are good examples of that model. And then if you have specialized

devices or metrics, we do have what we call custom data types and let your extend what can be

pulled and reported. Okay, so you're bringing in data from everything and you're doing it in

the modern way. You can pull in data. Like you said, via API, if that's what I want, you can

grab my data that way too. Okay, so specialized integrations then, like you mentioned,

you know, CISCO ACI and Moroccchi, does that mean like, yeah, we did some work to make sure that I

can model that specific sort of network device. 100%. We've got both of those fully built out in

the product and we ship with built-in dashboards for those. So, you connect StatSeeker to your API

key for those and you're up and running within minutes. There's really not a lot of configuration

to do. You can, we're very flexible, but there's not a lot of configuration to do out of the box,

but if you really want to get narrowed down to a specific picture, we can do that as well.

How often do you click in this data? For SNMP, we're pulling every minute for the API

integrations. We're pulling every five minutes. And just the big thing there is that we store those

five minute or one minute pulls indefinitely, as long as you've got the space for it on your server.

So, we don't roll anything up. We don't average it out. You never lose granularity. You never lose

granularity. That's a big part of what we do. So, you can go back months and see exactly what

happened in real time for any of your devices or interfaces. A lot of these platforms, even like

Moroccchi, for example, you know, they're doing a huge amount of heavy lifting around configuration

and there's a monitoring component, but they very much push you to the API and things like that if

you want to start doing kind of more analysis and extrapolation, things like that. And so,

that kind of integration really kind of does well with how we then collect and store the data.

And then you can kind of slice and dice it however you want.

So, I mean, typically we think of the network monitoring as on Chrome because we care about our

physical devices, those things we've lovingly racked up, but I'm going to have stuff all over

the place, things in the cloud and so on. I'm going to guess you can monitor all the things, yeah?

Yes. As long as the device has we have an API integration for it or we can do SNMP,

we have some way of talking to that device. Yes, we can. And then we can integrate it with

our databases. So, you can really put all your data together from different sources.

So, remote distributed environment wherever I don't have to think I'm hard about this.

Sure. So, you can play it on-prem as a VM in the cloud environments. We do have observability

appliances for distributed networks. That appliance can run monitoring services from a remote

location. Example services would be ping-pulling, ping-only discovery, things like that.

And then we just forward the result back to your central static server. It combines it all together

into one view. So, you get the reporting and dashboards from various sources distributed around

your network. So, centralized data store, but I can have observability out at my distributed edges

with the app. And that really lets you get consistent visibility across sites. And then you don't

have to redesign your monitoring around lots of separate tools that way. Okay. So, once you're

gathering this data, what are you doing with it? What am I as a customer looking at?

Sure. So, it is a huge amount of data just because we're pulling so often and pulling in so much.

And then, but that doesn't really do you any good if you don't have anything to do with it. So,

there's two big things. It turns data into answers right now and evidence for later.

In the moment, all that data is driving dashboards, reports, alerts. So, your team can see what's

changing and respond quickly. And then over time, because we've got all that historical data,

full resolution that we were talking about, you can replay incidents, do root cause analysis

without losing detail to averaging or roll ups or aggregation. Then there's also the proactive

side. So, that's here's a reporting engine. It uses historical baselines to model typical behavior.

So, that supports forecasting trend analysis. And that really allows you to spot bottlenecks or shifts

before they turn into outages. Give me an example of a dashboard. How would I construct that

secret dashboard? Maybe like a typical customer what they do with a dashboard that you've seen

be useful? Sure. Our dashboards are all GUI-based. It's very similar to Grafana. If you're familiar with

Grafana, so we offer a full library of pre-belt panels for most of the network metrics. So,

a good example would be utilization on your receive and transmit side. You can select a few interfaces,

select the panels we've already got built for you. And drop those onto a dashboard, specify your

time frame, what devices you want to look like. StatSeeker will start graphing that immediately.

And then you can drill down, get as specific as vast as you want. And if we don't have a built-in

panel, though we do have hundreds of them for all the most common use cases, we do a lot of

really advanced queries so you can design your own panels, HTML support. You can go to outside

data sources, really get in there and build exactly what you want based on all the data we're

saving for you. That's it. Exactly what I want. That's it. So, depending on what environment I mean,

I'm going to care about certain things and not care about other things. And there's certain

metrics I might be really important to me in other things in other environments that maybe I don't

care about. But you just said the magic words for me. I can build what I want. And if you don't

have the pre-belt panel, I can feed that data in or you're going to be able to get that and

graph it for me. Super customized, Julius. So, can you walk us through a couple of customer

use cases? You know, we've got a US retailer who has a very large environment, 10,000 stores

across the country. So, a lot of challenges. They wanted to map their entire environment.

So, you can kind of plot that longs against devices in Statsika. And we were able to kind of work

with them and create a proper 50,000-foot map view of their entire environment. It was fully

dynamic. They could go right to the store level if they wanted. And they plotted every critical

device, including their primary and secondary route or at that location. And they could see

for their management users, for their network team, things that were happening in real-time,

especially things like weather events, power outages, as well as planned firmware,

kind of rollouts and changes that were impacting stores. And in addition to seeing it kind of

happened in real-time and live, they could then use that data historically and look at all which

stores were impacted for the longest, when did services come back and restore? And they could

then kind of use that information for future kind of planned changes and another seasonal reporting.

I think I'm going to enter here. So, you just said 10,000 stores. This is a huge retail environment,

right? Yeah, correct. Yeah. This is okay. We've got some of these customers, yeah.

And this is not just red light green light. I heard a lot more kind of information that I can

pull in here. So, I shouldn't be thinking of this as like, oh, you tell me when things are down.

There's a lot more going on here. Yeah, correct. Because we kind of have a lot of flexibility

in how you choose, you as a customer choose what metrics you want to kind of focus on and be

kind of a priority. Yeah, stepping away from just the traditional up, down, you can actually be

specific about maybe looking around trip time or IPSLA or health metrics or even I've worked with

some customers on an aggregate of those that kind of creates a bit of a health score. So, there's

kind of flexibility to do that type of thing right within the platform.

And you even mentioned outside events that aren't necessarily rated to network performance

like weather. Like I'm from the USC's coast and we just got hit with a couple of big storms over

the past month that did impact like shipping and delivery and the ability to get stuff to people

and all that and I can imagine that could be useful information, particularly in a retail environment.

I've had customers that have their network environment on a map kind of side-by-side with their

weather events as well as the information that comes through HTML panel from their different

power suppliers that actually gives them real-time information around outages that are occurring

that impact parts of a city. And so, you can correlate a whole bunch of really nice kind of

pieces of data alongside that helps to kind of make a quicker decision for your network team.

And it also helps with things like management to kind of calm a management user to say,

this is fine, this isn't a network issue, this is kind of something that is unrelated to us.

Don't stress. Yeah, that mean time innocence by just putting like, there's six feet of snow.

So, uh, and the power's at. Yeah. So, there's lots of network monitoring and network performance

monitoring products out there. How would you differentiate that, Seeker? So, there's a lot of

tools out there. There's open source solutions. You know, every vendor now has a platform.

So, there is a lot of options out there. I guess going back to that point around what our DNA is,

it's really around data quality, the efficiency in how we collect kind of and store data,

and then the focus of what's that Seeker is all about. So, accurate data for us is everything.

You know, we value data kind of quite a lot, and we value our customers data a lot. So,

that that 60-second poll cycle that is kept un-average, that's, that's huge for our customers.

And that's why some of them have had Seeker for 15, 20 years because they go out to the market,

they look for a solution that can replicate what Seeker's doing for that kind of source of truth,

and it's not there. You know, they can't, they can't replicate that, especially at scale.

You know, with this big data collector, a highly efficient platform that doesn't hurt users

by scaling up, you know, so we don't have to have lots of heavy tuning and complicated

licensing to kind of make Seeker work. So, by that, in its very nature, you know, that's kind of

one of the differentiators that kind of makes it an administration simpler kind of solution,

and also a lower total cost of ownership solution. And one of the important pieces that there's

a lot of solutions out there, and Seeker's not your, not replacing your seam, it's not trying to

be your ticketing tool, it's, it's not trying to do everything. It's very focused for network

teams and networks on creating and providing clean, accurate metrics that can actually power

proper decision-making kind of processes. And that's why even this morning, I'm on a call with

another customer and they're just saying, Stan Seeker is our source of truth. We can refer to it,

we can rely on it. It's trusted within the team, and they can then use that information to,

to kind of drive what they're doing during a day, a week, not the whole year, for example.

Now, you mentioned along the way licensing talked about that. So, okay, how is the product

priced? Great question, isn't it? What everybody wants? I mean, obviously,

that's why we put it at the end. Look, if your listeners take nothing away from this,

Stan Seeker is deliberately uncomplicated, it's, it's a very kind of focused solution on doing,

you know, what it does in the network monitoring space really well. And we extend that simplicity

to our pricing. It's a per-instance subscription with a device count. So, how many devices you

want to monitor across your network? That's what makes up your kind of licensing model. So,

that starts from $6,500 for 250 devices, and then scales up there into what I spoke about before,

tens of thousands of devices, bomb a single Stan Seeker instance. And what about, are there add-ons

or especially specialized modules, because you mentioned integrations with other platforms and

products? Yeah, then the kind of modules that we spoke about, things like Cisco, Maraki, Cisco

ACI, and then also our observability appliance for that distributed remote polling. Those are kind of

add-ons if those relate to your technology and your environment or the architecture of what you

need. So, we can kind of bolt those on kind of additional cost in and around that licensing model.

Okay, but $6,500 for 250 devices out of the gate and then you scale from there.

Correct, yeah, correct. So, it really, it's not there to kind of blow up your IT budget.

It's there to kind of really kind of in a lot of ways kind of complement but be this powerful

solution that can kind of really scale properly with you. I think I know what you mean by devices,

but just to qualify because I know how a lot of network monitoring platforms are priced by

device, you mean a device that's got a switch with 48 ports, you're not building me per port.

Yeah, correct, yeah, like there'll be a device and it'll come with a certain number of interfaces,

but what is kind of important, I guess, is that device count.

So device count. Okay, yeah, not the element count. That's the way it's built on some other

platforms. The element and an interface is an element. That's not what you're doing.

So we mean actual devices. Yeah, okay. Yeah, so no, there's no sensors, there's no kind of,

there's no flows, you know, we're trying to keep it kind of simple and it is, you know.

So the other big question then besides pricing is can listeners play with it look at it,

try it for themselves? 100% that is what I always recommend people do. We offer a 30 day free

trial. It's fully featured. So we're giving you everything in the core product when you do that

trial. And it's just like everything else we talk about today, it's super simple to set up.

There's no credit card. You don't have to get on a sales call. And the trial is set up to show

you value very quickly. You can deploy and see live data fast. Then you can jump into those

pre-made dashboards I was talking about to find patterns, gaps in your capacity and just start

producing actionable reporting right away. Usually most users can be up and running within a

couple of hours. Install it. You run a discovery to find your network devices, put in your credentials,

and it's pretty much up and running from there and then you can really drill in. So yeah,

that's a good way for listeners to validate in their own environment whether it's a good fit for

them and how quickly they can detect and explain issues going forward once they have stats,

eCures, part of their daily process. Because most like engineers, no credit card and no sales

call. It's like it's almost like you understand how engineers think. I don't want to talk to anybody.

Let me try the thing. Please just leave me alone until I'm ready. 100%. I definitely come from the

engineering side before I spent a long time building networks and I was a stats eCure customer

for a long time. So I know I know that side of it very well. All right, well, we're at time,

but hopefully we've wet people's appetites to go and explore this for themselves. If they want to

go find out more or get the download, where should they go? statseager.com slash net ups has

everything you need on there. Just check out that website. You can sign up for the trial,

get some more information on our features, system requirements, all that. It's all all documented

statseager.com slash net ups. All right, that's statseager.com slash net ups will also have that

link in the show notes that accompany this podcast. And if you do reach out to statseager,

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