The Detroit Tigers may not have won the World Series last year, but the IT department considered it a winning season when all the pre-series attention forced it to investigate network traffic to get a better understanding of who was visiting the site and what they were doing there.

In fact, Scott Wrubel, IT director for the major league baseball team, was a bit confused as to why his organization wasn't making the expected money off of downloads of streaming media content from the Tigers' Web site. And Wrubel knew that with a successful season, the Web site would see more demand and perhaps suffer under the stress of a high influx of traffic.

"We supplied press box Internet access and we started to see the stress on the system became enough that we were having a lot of outages," Wrubel says now. "We had added capacity with a burstable DS-3 line for special functions and we knew we needed to have an enterprise level solution in place to provide intrusion prevention and ensure we could meet capacity."

That's when Wrubel started to consider Lancope. The company's StealthWatch product, which watches traffic, discovers normal behavior and can alert on anomalies in traffic patterns. The technology's traffic analysis capabilities can show network managers the applications traversing the net and the hosts that are in demand. Lancope coupled that capability with routing and network protocol information that combines security analysis with network optimization tools so customers like Wrubel can understand traffic spikes and see when unauthorized behavior occurs.

For instance, Wrubel found out that international press journalists were illegally downloading streaming content off the Web site for free. With Lancope, Wrubel can spot those illegal downloads and prevent his organization from losing money.

StealthWatch is packaged on appliances that are distributed across a network, near a core switch or data center router. Upon installation, the technology performs a benchmark of normal traffic behavior and continuously monitors for changes. The product doesn’t sit in the line of network traffic, but passively monitors conversations between hosts and clients. Administrators can tap into the appliances via a Web-based interface or use the management console to configure, monitor and generate reports from the distributed appliances. With StealthWatch in place making sure traffic is moving along and illegal downloads are at an end, IT staff for the Detroit Tigers can focus on more important things.

Denise Dubie is senior editor with Network World.