Exception reports are the basic information source for troubleshooting all of your network woes. Using my Microsoft Internet Explorer browser, I simply selected RouterPM's most recent weekly report and asked the software to sort by agent. Within seconds, I had a rundown of each routers' problems and issues. After noting some problems with high collision on one router, I easily switched to "Trend Analysis" and plotted a graph of Ethernet and serial port utilization over the last week. For the most part, our router has very low utilization, but a few isolated peaks are generating collision exceptions.
The PM products also offer trend analysis to signal current and potential problems. I configured Router PM to graph some statistics on our Internet router each day. However, I was quite disappointed to see the daily plots on a week-long chart. I'd like to be able to zoom in on the daily peak via more granular data and plots.
The PM products also offer some rudimentary capacity planning by making a linear projection from the last 100 hours of data from the network. All of our routers are expected to handle our capacity for a minimum of a year. I wish that the included capacity-planning utility would provide tips on extending the life of my current equipment, but that may be too complex a task for this suite of software.
Checking Bit by Bit SniffMaster browser is also integrated into SSDS, providing an interface to packet trace via Net.Medic clients and RMON probes. This three-tier protocol trace lets the RMON probe (or Net.Medic client) capture packets, the SniffMaster server decode the information and any Java-enabled browser display the decoded data in a screen that resembles the traditional Sniffer console.
In the lab, I fired up a SnifferMaster session with a Technically Elite RMON probe located in Network Computing's Syracuse University lab. From there, data was captured on a segment in Syracuse, exported to the SniffMaster server in Wisconsin and displayed on my Netscape browser in Manhasset, N.Y. Now that's distributed troubleshooting.
However, I ran into a few problems with certain browsers. Internet Explorer for Windows was the only browser that worked reliably. IE for Macintosh would not load the Java applet under Apple's MRJ or Microsoft's Java VM. Netscape behaved somewhat erratically on all platforms. While downloading packets from the RMON probe to the SniffMaster server, my display never left the "downloading packets" display. The addition of a progress bar would troubleshoot this problem.
Display in SniffMaster mimics our trusty Network Associates Sniffer. The familiar three-pane interface let me move from frame to frame, looking at the transactions, decodes and raw data. Under Navigator, the screen popped up in a small window and I couldn't resize it properly. Network Associates says it plans to fix this in the final release.
In addition to using SnifferMaster for RMON probe captures, I performed a packet trace on a Microsoft Windows95 machine running the Net.Medic client. If a user complains about network problems, you can packet-trace the data which his or her machine sees. This kind of capture doesn't use promiscuous mode, so you will only see the packets entering or leaving that particular machine--as long as the end user grants you access.
Robert J. Kohlhepp can be reached at rkohlhepp@nwc.com.
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