How to Gain Full Visibility into Your AWS Network Stack in Seconds?
Tags: awsnetwork, vpc, subnet, howto
Published: 2018-12-04 16:26:55

---
title: How to Gain Full Visibility into Your AWS Network Stack in Seconds?
published: true
description: Humans are visual by nature. So, visual cues in 3D space offering immersive and interactive traits help debug any network misconfiguration faster compared to tabular-styled debugging tools. Read this post to see how TotalCloud Network View helps in understanding the entire AWS infra swiftly using such visual interactiveness. 
tags: AWS Network, VPC, Subnet, howto
---
<span style="color: #000000;">How are you resolving misconfigurations or AWS network issues in your AWS? How much time do you spend on an average while debugging issues? If it’s more than an hour, you probably are using a wrong tool!</span>
<blockquote><b><i><span style="color: #000000;">Humans are visual by nature.  A major research states that a</span> </i></b><a href="http://www.t-sciences.com/news/humans-process-visual-data-better"><b><i>human brain process images 60,000 times faster than text</i></b></a><b><i>. <span style="color: #000000;">In addition, 90 percent of information transmitted to the brain are visual. So, visual cues help debug any misconfiguration faster when compared to tabular or dashboard-styled debugging tools. Even in the most `hyper-complex cloud environment.  </span></i></b></blockquote>
<span style="color: #000000;">Plus, cloud provider's new services bring in more abstraction. Such services might hide elements from a network layer on top of them. So, to contextually understand resource connection or to understand these resource performance in granularity, a visual console is more appropriate.</span>

<span style="color: #000000;">Take for instance -- you want to check resources’ connection inside a VPC. To this end, using a tabular format or several dashboards is cumbersome. Tools like cloud mapper do provide a topology view but these services cannot provide end-to-end context of things at multiple levels. Whereas, a visual console that can map and show live relations between resources can help you understand the entire topology; plus, save you lots of effort.</span>

<span style="color: #000000;">To demonstrate this, let’s consider a simple web server architecture as shown below. The architecture is basic with an instance and few S3 buckets across two regions.</span>

<img class="alignnone wp-image-1064" src="https://thepracticaldev.s3.amazonaws.com/i/mw985hix0n05fra796gn.png" alt="A simple web server architecture " width="589" height="371" />

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<span style="color: #000000;">For an architecture as simple as this, finding all the subnets in a region and the resource relationships in a tabular format or a dashboard is challenging. As the application’s complexity scales up, so does its architecture.  </span>

<span style="color: #000000;"><b>Here’s a video of <em>TotalCloud Network View</em> of the same architecture. TotalCloud's interactive visual console shows all the subnet distribution and relationship between the resources on a single pane.  </b></span>

{% youtube 1po56QMlWyA %}


<span style="color: #000000;"><b>From the above video you can observe that an immersive visual console helps you understand any architectures easier. In fact, 100X faster, compared to tabular or visualization dashboards. And for a dynamic environment like AWS, such a view provides complete cloud visibility.</b></span>

<span style="color: #000000;">Apart from watching all the subnets, you can even drill down further to each subnet to check if Route Tables and NACLs are configured right. This demonstrates a focused view of the network. This helps you overcome AWS design failures and identify any blind spots present, at multiple levels, in seconds.</span>
<h2><span style="color: #000000;">Some of the use cases that TotalCloud AWS Network View can help you resolve quickly, are:</span></h2>
<ul>
 	<li><span style="color: #000000;"><b>Find Resources Accessible to the Internet and Vice Versa: </b>Spot open ports or misconfiguration affecting AWS security posture.</span></li>
 	<li><span style="color: #000000;"><b>Understand Accessibility Between Different Subnets: </b>Contextually understand subnet relationships residing in a VPC for better network analysis.</span></li>
 	<li><span style="color: #000000;"><b>Analyze Route Table and NACL Configurations:</b> View Route Tables and NACLs configured to each subnet in real-time to peruse AWS security.</span></li>
 	<li><span style="color: #000000;"><b>Find Affected Resources: </b>Watch network components on a live topology with contextual information to catch design-failures or security threats faster.</span></li>
 	<li><span style="color: #000000;"><b>Find Publicly Accessible Resources Associated with a Subnet: </b>View all the subnets within each VPC and drill down further to view public resources within each subnet.</span></li>
</ul>
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<h3><a href="https://totalcloud.io/user-signup.html"><span style="color: #000000;"><b><span style="text-decoration: underline;">Sign-up for 30 days free trial to see all these in live action.</span></b></span></a></h3>
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<h2><span style="color: #000000;"><b>Conclusion</b>:</span></h2>
<span style="color: #000000;">Maintaining a well-configured AWS network is a cloud user’s responsibility. TotalCloud helps realize it effortlessly with its focused view, rapid live debugging feature, and rich topology visualizations.</span>

<span style="color: #000000;">If you are looking to understand AWS Security posture at a glance,</span> <a href="http://blog.totalcloud.io/reinforce-aws-security-posture-multiple-levels-seconds/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">read this post</a>.

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<span style="color: #000000;"> Note: Originally published at <a href="https://blog.totalcloud.io/gain-full-visibility-aws-network-stack-seconds/" target="_blank" rel="noopener"> blog.totalcloud.io </a> on December 4, 2018.
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