Application security firm F5 Inc. today announced that it has acquired real-time network observability and intelligence company MantisNet for an undisclosed price.

Founded in 2012, MantisNet offers cloud-native network observability software designed to simplify the process of accessing and extracting network intelligence in real time. The company delivers high-resolution insight into containerized and dynamic network environments, especially those involving ephemeral and encrypted traffic flows.

MantisNet’s offering includes the Containerized Visibility Fabric, an eBPF‑powered solution that operates within cloud‑native infrastructures without relying on sidecars or heavy agents. CVF continuously captures and streams rich network metadata, such as encrypted session details, flow identifiers, topology inventory and protocol‑specific insights in real time and with minimal performance overhead.

The company’s approach embraces data‑in‑motion observability that delivers telemetry directly where it’s generated instead of relying solely on logs or packet captures stored at rest. The CVF agents are deployed as lightweight microservices within secure kernel space, working in an event‑driven fashion to collect, filter and serialize data into streaming metadata through high‑performance messaging systems, such as Kafka or NATS.

MantisNet also supports legacy telemetry methods, such as packet capture, NetFlow and Internet Protocol Flow Information Export, to ensure compatibility with existing analytics tools and compliance workflows. The technology can stream or archive data into traditional repositories to support integration with familiar platforms like Wireshark or security information and event management systems for forensic analysis, regulatory auditing or intelligence workflow.

Post-acquisition, F5 plans to integrate MantisNet capabilities into the F5 Application Delivery and Security Platform to allow organizations to confidently transition to cloud-native architectures while maintaining deep operational visibility, automation, and security.

F5 says MantisNet’s low-latency telemetry combined with F5 ADSP’s cloud-native network functions, policy engines and analytics will give information technology teams a powerful and adaptive automation fabric.

With MantisNet, F5 will enable customers to gain visibility into encrypted sessions by capturing metadata and pre-encryption context from TLS 1.3 while also automating policy enforcement by feeding real-time insights directly into BIG-IP Policy Enforcement Manager or BIG-IP Advanced Firewall Manager for immediate action.

The integration will also help organizations meet compliance requirements through programmatic packet capture and historical flow retention and it will strengthen protection of east-west container traffic that is often missed by traditional monitoring tools.

F5 was previously in the news in June when it announced a series of new post-quantum cryptography readiness solutions. They’re part of its Application Delivery and Security Platform to help organizations prepare for the cybersecurity threats posed by quantum computing.

Image: Mantisnet