Monitoring traffic in terms of its volume is very useful for performance and capacity planning purposes. At times it is also useful to understand the type of traffic that is flowing through the network. In the event of an unexpected increase in traffic, it can be very helpful to analyse the traffic by protocol type e.g. IP, ARP, RARP, IPX, and be able to compare to previous analysis data.

The Traffic Analyzer probe looks inside the Ethernet packets and unravels them to reveal the type of protocol that they are carrying. This probe is able to show bandwidth usage between source and destination addresses broken down by protocol. It is possible to set up various profiles to aggregate source and destination addresses in to networks or subsets of networks. These profiles can be separately monitored with different threshold values for alerting purposes.

The probe comes predefined with a set of system counters such as all Ethernet traffic or all TCP/IP traffic.

All the data from this probe can be passed to the Service Level Manager for inclusion in performance trending reports.

Fig. 1 The Network Traffic Analyzer Probe, status view.

Fig. 1 The Network Traffic Analyzer Probe, status view.

Fig. 2 The Network Interface Traffic Probe, status view.

Fig. 2 Traffic utilization in % of the total bandwidth.

"With a single tool we can now provide a complete end-to-end picture of all components of an application and their integrated performance versus the straight-line, element-focused approach from before.

Because of NimBUS' easy drag-and-drop templates, we were able to cut down migration time considerably, get customers up and running with new NimBUS monitoring quickly and turn off the old systems. IntelliNet was able to convert all of its customers to NimBUS in less than 6 months."

John Bradbury, Vice President of Managed Services, IntelliNet