NetFort LANGuardian is a software product that gives you a detailed view of what is happening on your network, enabling you to take a proactive approach to managing it instead of reacting to events after they have happened.

The LANGuardian core system monitors network traffic via the monitoring port on your core switch. It can monitor traffic conforming to standard protocols such as NetFlow and sFlow. LANGuardian stores traffic data in a database, so you can view historical as well as real-time activity on your LAN.

LANGuardian has a web browser interface that's easy to use and accessible from anywhere on your network. The home page is laid out in a dashboard format that shows you at a glance how your LAN is performing. It's also customizable, so you can set it up to prioritize the information you really need to see.

The LANGuardian core monitoring system comes with a number of optional modules that extend monitoring, intrustion detection and analysis capabilities on your network. These modules include the Bandwidth Quota Monitor, Windows FileShare Monitor, SQL Server Database Monitor, Email Monitor and the Web Browser Monitor.

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Customizable browser-based interface

NetFort LANGuardian is browser-based. Its home page is laid out as a series of tabs, each of which contains a dashboard that you can customize by dragging and dropping the graphs and reports you are interested in. You can set up different dashboards for different users to meet their individual monitoring requirements.

Raw traffic, Cisco NetFlow traffic, and sFlow traffic

At the heart of LANGuardian is a sophisticated traffic collection engine that collects, interprets, and stores raw traffic, Cisco NetFlow traffic, and sFlow traffic. Together with the underlying LANGuardian proprietary database and the sophisticated user interface, the traffic collection engine provides real-time and historical visibility of network activity.

Network intrusion detection system (NIDS)

LANGuardian includes an advanced network intrusion detection system (NIDS) that enables real-time detection and alerting of malicious events that occur on your network. Configured via a rule-based language, it can monitor network traffic using the signature, protocol, and anomaly methods of inspection.

The LANGuardian NIDS uses several pre-processors to perform stateful protocol analysis and normalization of all requests and responses in a session or connection. This enables the system to identify threats that  have several components, which can escape detection when data packets are analyzed individually.

SOX, PCI, and GCSx Compliance

The LANGuardian SQL Server Database Monitor can help you to implement the internal controls and reporting systems that enable you to demonstrate compliance with standards such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) and the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI-DSS).

The LANGuardian Windows FileShare Monitor enables you to maintain a comprehensive audit trail on all file shares on your network so you can demonstrate compliance with standards such as SOX, PCI, and GCSx Code of Connection (CoCo). requirements.

Data forensics

The ability of LANGuardian to combine real-time and historical data makes it the ideal tool for data forensics. You can run reports for limited time periods to investigate specific circumstances and answer questions such as "who was on the system over the weekend?" and "which users used the most bandwidth last month?"

Trend monitoring over time

With the LANGuardian Trend Wizard, you can choose from a large number of trends and observe them over a specified period of time. For example, you can monitor traffic to a specific server or traffic originating from a specific user. As with all other LANGuardian graphs and reports, the trend graphs have drill-down capabilities that provide access to more detailed information at a click.

Instant alerting and e-mail notification

You can configure LANGuardian to send e-mail alerts to designated users whenever specified network events occur. You can also schedule any report to be sent by e-mail at regular intervals.

Alerts on Reports

Alerts on reports improves the flexibilty of LANGuardian alerting. Using this feature in conjunction with the Custom Report feature, LANGuardian can be configured to generate alerts when certain, user defined conditions or events are seen. For example, a custom report can be created that shows all client systems that generate more than 1GB of network traffic in a 2 hour period. If this occurs, then an event is generated. Using this technique a series of policy, or business use cases can be configured and LANGuardian will automatically alert of any deviations.

Try LANGuardian on your network

You can download and try the NetFort LANGuardian on your network for 30 days as part of the LANGuardian core system. The download is available in ISO (65.4 MB) or VMware (159 MB) format here.

You can also try out the LANGuardian on our live demo system here. Contact support@netforttechnologies.com for assistance.