With the growing need for businesses to monitor and mine the transactions occurring in their data centers, a new class of device is becoming available. These event monitors operate at the OSI Application Layer 7 on the network. They gather the packets from the network and reassemble those into complete messages. From there, they utilize scripts and application specific programs to decode and act on those messages. The appliance forwards these messages on to applications which deal with the contents and extract the business value from them.

Event Monitor Benefits

The actions taken and the applications to which the messages are forwarded by event monitors can be based on policies designed for:

• Security: search for information and files that should not be included in incoming or outgoing transactions.
• Event Tracking: specific transactions and sessions can be identified and tracked by users.
• Business Intelligence: monitor and forward specific orders, transactions, and user information for later analysis.
• Web Analytics: gather detailed information on access trends and usage.
• Marketing: associate users with the information that they access for real-time or future marketing campaigns.