In the world of mission-critical networks, the very idea that you may be ‘playing a hunch’ when it comes to investigating a service-affecting issue likely would be met with utter derision. The pressure is to provide confident answers to critical questions; what happened, who was affected and how long will it take to resolve. This can be daunting especially when the air is thick with accusations and the ‘interested parties’ trending towards ‘C-level’ can be insurmountable.
Of course, the truth is that playing educated hunches lies at the very heart of network troubleshooting. It is only after following and discarding a number of possibilities that you can exonerate yourself in what is known as the mean-time-to-innocence.
The problem, of course, is that doing the right thing takes time. Chasing ‘dead ends’ is perceived as wasted effort, especially if any step in the process takes longer than necessary or blocks further activity.
The unfortunate truth is that legacy packet capture devices often fall into that category. Having the packets of interest (POI) provides the confidence you need to ensure the abstraction of your analysis tool isn’t misleading you. But extracting the packets can take hours. In such a situation, the temptation exists to skip this crucial step, cross your fingers and make a call without all the facts.
In an ideal world, you wouldn’t have to be in the position of having to decide whether to ‘risk a packet trace’ or ‘risk a miscall.’ The trace would be extracted quickly and quietly whilst you continued to visibly explore other avenues.
This is where the new EndaceProbeTM Network Recorder software release EP5.2 comes in. With this release, we’ve eliminated traditional bottlenecks in the packet investigation process to ensure you can have the confidence of a packet trace quickly and without fuss.
- Dramatically faster packet downloads. Our unique ‘Download Acceleration’ capability ensures the EndaceProbe knows the location of every packet on the disk. The time needed to extract a trace is determined by the number of packets you asked for and not the number of packets the device must search through and discard.
- Immediate access to packet analysis. No time is wasted, or network load incurred, pulling packets to your desktop as traffic of interest can be extracted to on-EndaceProbe ‘archive files’ for investigation with our on board packet inspection tool EndacePacketsTM. You don’t even need to wait for the extraction to finish, as EndacePackets is immediately available. Of course, download is still supported (and accelerated) should you wish to analyze the trace in other tools.
- Continue to work whilst traffic is extracted. Whilst archives are being created, EndaceVisionTM Network Visibility Software remains available for other analysis, ensuring you are never prevented from exploring other possibilities. You will be notified as soon as your archive (or download) completes and you can start others if needed.
So, next time you’re in a firefight and not sure where to turn, play a hunch, in fact play as many as you need. EndaceProbe software release EP5.2 will get the packet data rapidly and without interruption, and you’ll be providing an answer you can be truly confident in.