If you get the concept of what the tool is doing, it helps tremendously. The complex portion comes in with spanning traffic to the multi-port collector. For Enterprise solutions, this product requires the use of a physical server that is called the multi-port collector.

The purpose of this device is to capture the traffic and share it with the application for analysis. To keep the multi-port collector from being in the path of traffic, we have configured our Cisco switches to span, (send a copy), of the traffic to the multi-port collector based on VLANs. If you can get the spans working correctly to the multi-port collector, configuring the application is not too difficult.

The initial setup is complex. The length of time for deployment depends on the size of the company and the size of the project. At a minimum, it will take ten to fifteen days, but it could take up to one year.

The initial setup isn't complex, but it's not straightforward either. It's somewhere in the middle. Deployment takes about five days.