Enterprise networks have become impossible to see clearly. What used to span a few data centers now sprawls across multiple clouds, edge deployments, and Kubernetes clusters, each with its own monitoring blind spots. Traditional approaches built around metrics, logs, and sampled traffic are struggling to keep pace, leaving network and security teams flying blind when troubleshooting critical issues or hunting threats.
The problem is not a lack of data. Organizations are drowning in telemetry from dozens of disconnected tools. The challenge is getting accurate, granular visibility that can pinpoint root causes across hybrid environments without introducing latency or missing critical packets. To understand how the industry is addressing this, The Tolly Group recently spoke with Erik Rudin, VP of Strategy at cPacket, about their approach to comprehensive network observability.
Why Legacy Monitoring Creates Blind Spots
Most monitoring tools rely on sampling, snapshots, or aggregated metrics that miss the details needed for accurate troubleshooting. As Rudin explains, these approaches are fundamentally limited. "A lot of technologies that are more traditional, either metrics, events, logs, traces, they're sampling or they're getting a snapshot. Correlating and indexing the logs is very difficult to do across multiple locations. And this evidence tends to be very subjective."
The consequences show up daily in operations. A performance issue affecting a single container traversing multiple sites can take days to isolate because logs don't correlate across locations. NetFlow data misses the microbursts that actually cause application slowdowns. Security teams lack the packet-level evidence needed for forensic analysis in regulated industries.
Packet-based observability offers a different foundation. "We start with the packets. We see packets as the source of truth. They're very granular in nature," Rudin notes. By capturing and analyzing actual network traffic rather than sampling or inferring from aggregated data, organizations gain definitive proof of what happened, when it happened, and which systems were involved.
This matters most in environments where downtime is not an option. Rudin identifies four verticals where visibility gaps create the most risk: financial services, where millisecond-level precision is required for market data feeds and regulatory compliance; healthcare systems managing consolidation across hospital networks; government agencies concerned with data exfiltration and insider threats; and large enterprises running mission-critical AI workloads that demand zero downtime.
Architecture Built for Performance and Scale
cPacket addresses the visibility challenge through purpose-built hardware designed to capture and process traffic at multi-gigabit speeds without packet loss. The company leverages NVIDIA Spectrum-X switches at the aggregation layer, optimized with their own firmware to handle traffic up to 400 gigabits. "We are using NVIDIA hardware because of their performance, but also wrote the software stack from the ground up, mainly to add the analytics capabilities such as microburst analysis," Rudin explains.
The architecture employs FPGAs to offload processing from the CPU, enabling what cPacket calls line rate processing with lossless packet acquisition. On the capture side, the system scales to 200 gigabits with hardware-based acceleration handling not just capture but also indexing, search, and retrieval.
Beyond raw capture, the platform provides sophisticated packet manipulation capabilities. "We have different capabilities around filtering, slicing, and manipulating the packets based on the workload or the use case, so that the customer is optimizing for all the information that they need in order to get to that insight," Rudin notes. This flexibility allows organizations to tailor visibility to specific requirements without overwhelming downstream tools.
A Unified Platform Approach
Rather than offering point solutions, cPacket positions its technology as an integrated platform with five core components; it's a modular platform but offers great value when they work together. The packet broker suite includes both aggregation-layer switches and higher-order FPGA-based systems for sophisticated workloads requiring deep analytics. Packet capture systems scale based on network speed and retention requirements while maintaining consistent APIs and analytics across all sizes. A centralized management layer ties everything together, providing metadata analytics and integrations across the entire stack.
The fourth component addresses cloud and hybrid deployments. "We have been building and optimizing our entire stack, both the packet broker, packet capture and packet analytics to run inside of the cloud, including extending into Kubernetes and cluster-based monitoring," Rudin explains. This cloud-native approach eliminates the gap between on-premises and cloud visibility that plagues many legacy solutions.
AI-Powered Observability Launch
The fifth platform component brings AI-driven capabilities to network observability. cPacket's AI capabilities introduce Model Context Protocols (MCPs) that allow organizations to integrate their preferred generative AI frameworks directly with cPacket's packet data. The Insight Engine provides a data pipeline with AI-based anomaly detection that establishes baselines over time and surfaces deviations automatically.
"We're able to gather, say a week or less of data to start building that baseline and then surfacing up anomalies against very specific insights tied to different workflows, different customer use cases," Rudin explains. The system spans both network operations and security operations use cases, but cPacket deliberately avoids per-use-case licensing. The AI capabilities are offered as an uplift to packet capture pricing, providing additional analytics without complex licensing negotiations.
The AI integration takes a measured approach focused on trust and validation. Rather than immediately acting on recommendations, the system can operate in advisory mode, showing administrators what it would recommend before allowing automated actions. Current AI capabilities analyze root and probable causes using vast metadata, metrics, and data pipelines.
Detecting What Others Miss: The Microburst Challenge
One of cPacket's key technical differentiators is its ability to detect microbursts, those sub-second traffic spikes that wreak havoc on application performance while remaining invisible to most monitoring tools. "We're seeing things that are happening sub-second," Rudin explains. "That gives us better indications of problems or even connecting that to the individual host or container that is creating bursts. That's very, very hard to do."
This capability directly impacts troubleshooting efficiency. Without microburst visibility, teams spend days chasing phantom performance issues. With cPacket's granular packet analysis, they can immediately identify the specific container or host causing problems, cutting research time dramatically.
Roadmap: Expanded Analytics and Enhanced Security
cPacket continues to expand its analytics capabilities across the platform. The latest version of their cStor packet capture product now includes enhanced TCP, DNS, and HTTPS analytics. The packet broker line is adding snapshot capture functionality, allowing administrators to capture traffic samples directly at the broker level.
Security remains a platform-wide priority. cPacket achieved FIPS 140-2 and SOC 2 Type 1 compliance in 2024, and continues pursuing additional certifications including Common Criteria and SOC 2 Type 2 to ensure their appliances meet the stringent requirements of mission-critical and highly regulated networks. "We know these are going into mission critical networks. They're going into highly regulated networks," Rudin notes. "So we're doing things like Common Criteria, FIPS 140-2, SOC 2 Type 2."
Complementing, Not Replacing Security Tools
An important distinction: cPacket does not position itself as a replacement for network detection and response or threat intelligence platforms. Instead, the company feeds packet data to an ecosystem of security partners including Corelight, ExtraHop, Vectra, Darktrace, and others that specialize in threat hunting and vulnerability detection.
"We have about 12 different ecosystem partners that are more on the security side that are doing that next click down," Rudin notes. "They're very purpose-built to look for things like zero-day vulnerabilities. We don't intend to do that work." cPacket's scalable observability platform is better suited to identify insights such as DDOS attempts, exfiltration, or potential bot activities that network operations teams can act on immediately without waiting for security tool correlation.
This approach recognizes the convergence happening between network operations and security operations. The same packet-level insights serve both teams, but each applies different analytical lenses to that foundational data.
Deployment Flexibility and Pricing
cPacket offers deployment flexibility that matters for budget planning. Organizations can choose between capital expenditure models with perpetual licensing plus ongoing maintenance, or operational expenditure models with subscription pricing. "I would say a majority of our customers have started to shift to subscription," Rudin notes, though both options remain available.
Pricing scales primarily with network speed and data retention requirements. A typical enterprise deployment starts in the low six figures, with costs increasing based on port density, capture capacity, and compliance-driven retention needs. The company bundles the entire feature set into single SKUs rather than charging separately for different capabilities, simplifying procurement and avoiding surprise upgrade costs.
The Business Case for Packet-Based Visibility
Organizations evaluating comprehensive visibility solutions should consider the operational and security benefits that justify investment. Packet-based observability cuts mean time to resolution by providing definitive proof of network behavior rather than requiring correlation across multiple sampling tools. Security incident response improves when teams have full packet captures for forensic analysis. Network optimization becomes possible when microbursts and sub-second anomalies become visible rather than hidden between polling intervals, enabling teams to pinpoint issues at the container or host level that would take days to isolate with traditional tools.
For regulated industries, the compliance benefits are equally compelling. Having lossless capture at line rate provides the audit trail required by financial services regulators and the forensic evidence needed for incident investigations in healthcare and government environments.
Key Takeaways
Legacy monitoring approaches based on sampling and aggregated metrics create visibility gaps that impact both troubleshooting and security
Packet-based observability provides definitive evidence of network behavior across hybrid environments
Purpose-built hardware with FPGA offload enables lossless capture at 200 gigabits without introducing latency
AI-driven anomaly detection provides proactive insights while maintaining human oversight
cPacket complements rather than replaces security tools, feeding packet data to specialized threat detection platforms
Learn More
For detailed information about cPacket's network visibility platform and the newly announced AI capabilities, visit cpacket.com or connect with Erik Rudin on LinkedIn.