Introduction Aggregation groups provide a means of grouping tool ports to simplify the mapping of a tap port to multiple tools and allow grouping of alike applications. In current releases, each tap port can only be bound to one default aggregation group at any time. A tool port however, can simultaneously be a member of multiple aggregation groups. This is important as it allows multiple tools or tool servers to receive any of the multiple traffic flows input to the tap ports. The Tap Aggregation operator can for example have an IDS/IPS tool receiving the same traffic as an application...
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Introduction Capturing raw network packet data, whether it be from a mirror port or through an aggregation infrastructure, is often perceived to be a complex task. In reality, most of the anomalies or limitations faced by those starting out with capture have simple explanations and are usually not due to problems with the source devices but instead the capturing tool. This article provides a brief of commonly reported issues and some suggested avenues of investigation. Timestamping Timestamps missing or corrupt Check timestamping is configured correctly to match the hosts’ expectations (i.e. is the host looking in the right place for...
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Introduction Traditional approaches to network monitoring rely on the ongoing collection of generic, high level statistics such as interface utilization from a selection of network devices to detect trends or anomalies in service availability. Such metrics are naturally limited in the level of granularity they can provide and often only provide a hint of real underlying network conditions without providing any visibility into per-application activity or performance. Traditionally, reactive and localized packet capture would be employed to determine the cause of the performance degradation.  However the manual nature of needing to configure packet capture and mirroring and then physically attach...
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