October 07, 2001
Questions, Questions!
What's your favorite color? Why is the sky blue? What have we got to do to put you in this car today? Is your network analyzer asking questions? More accurately, does your network analyzer prompt you to ask questions about your network?
Many of us use a network analysis tool every day, and we often head directly to the capture/decode features of our analyzer. We'll capture some frames, decode some frames, watch some server conversations, and monitor the overall traffic traversing the network. Although traffic decodes provide detailed packet information, there may be many questions about the overall network health that you may be missing.
The monitor functions and graphing capabilities of a network analyzer should prompt the network analyst to ask questions about network usability. If the utilization of the network is high, then who's using the bandwidth? After examining a Top Talkers list, there might be a few network users who are using a majority of the bandwidth. Why do those users require so much bandwidth?
Even looking through non-filtered protocol decodes can prompt for additional questions. Why are there so many BPDU multicasts? Why is our primary application sending information in such small frames? Is there anything we can do to make this application run more efficiently?
The next time you are troubleshooting a network problem, take a few minutes to ask some questions. You may be surprised at the answers!
Posted by james_messer at October 7, 2001 11:38 PM
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