Network administrators lack the tools they need to understand and react to their changing networks. This makes it difficult for them to make informed, timely decisions regarding network management, capacity planning, and security. These challenges will only increase as networks continue to gain in throughput, become more complex, and encrypt more and more of their traffic.This paper describes the Passive Network Appliance, or PNA, which is our proposed solution to this problem. The PNA provides snapshots of network behavior through time, in a cost-effective manner. The PNA is implemented on commodity hardware and can enforce network policy in realtime at the granularity of network frame arrival. This paper describes the system, and its evaluation in laboratory and real-world deployments.

Nearly all programmable commercial hardware solutions offered for high-speed networking systems are capable of meeting the performance and flexibility requirements of equipment vendors. However, the primary obstacle to adoption lies with the software architectures and programming environments supported by these systems. Shortcomings include use of unfamiliar languages and libraries, portability and backwards compatibility, vendor lock-in, design and development learning curve, availability of competent developers, and a small existing base of software. Another key shortcoming of previous architectures is that either they are not multi-core oriented or they expose all the hardware details, making it very hard for programmers to deal with. In this paper, we present a practical software architecture for high-speed embedded systems that is portable, easy to learn and use, multicore oriented, and efficient.

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