High-performance network monitoring and analysis can be carried and hardware-level filters can be set to capture only traffic of interest
GL Communications, a provider of telecom test and measurement solutions, has launched a wirespeed packet capture application called “PacketScanPX”, developed by leveraging the company’s PacketExpert 10GX and PacketScan products. The PacketScanPX can capture IP traffic at up to 10 Gbps and analyze thousands of protocols including Voice over IP (VoIP) signalling and traffic.
PacketScanPX works by utilizing the wirespeed network tap functionality of PacketExpert and feeding it to the PacketScan software for high-performance network monitoring and analysis. The captured packets are streamed from the PacketExpert to the PacketScan over the USB 3.0 connection.
While capturing traffic, the PacketExpert allows the user to set hardware-level filters to capture only traffic of interest. Up to 16 hardware level filters can be defined per port. Filters can be set for various header fields like Source/Destination MAC/IP addresses, UDP/TCP ports, 802.1Q VLAN Id/Priority fields, IP ToS/DSCP fields, Frame size, etc. Users can also define filters at the individual byte level. Furthermore, the individual filters can be combined into groups and the groups can be further combined into supergroups for additional flexibility.
Important Features
- Capture and analyze Ethernet/IP traffic on either 1G ports or 10G ports (two 1G ports or two 10G ports)
- Capture and analyze at full wirespeed, up to 8 Gigabytes of traffic utilizing the onboard 8 GB DDR3 RAM
- Capture and analyze continuously at reduced rates of up to 2 Gbps (depends on the conditions)
- Complex Filtering capabilities to filter incoming wirespeed traffic at the hardware level and forward to the packet analyzer
- Create up to 16 user-defined hardware filters per port to filter-out traffic based on MAC, VLAN, IP, MPLS, TCP, UDP, Framesize and Raw Hex Bytes parameters
- Precise hardware timestamping with microsecond accuracy
- PacketScanPX can monitor the progress of up to 2000 simultaneous calls with bidirectional RTP traffic
- Capture and analyze packets in real-time. Save the captured trace to disk
- Statistics can be obtained for any fields or parameters in the protocol to study the performance and trend in the VoIP network
- Provides frame count, byte count, frames/sec, and bytes/sec etc. of any of the protocol fields
- PacketScanPX can work with GL’s VoiceBand Analyzer (VBA) and Call Data Records (CDR) applications. These records can be investigated for bad calls using custom Excel addins
- PacketScanPX can send summary data (protocol fields and call detail records) to a central database. NetSurveyorWeb displays the data from the database in a simple web-based browser, featuring rich graphics, custom search capability, report exporting and filter configurations
- PacketScanPX can work with GL’s VoiceBand Analyzer (VBA) and Call Data Records (CDR) applications to record voice files for each direction
“PacketExpert is a versatile Ethernet testing tool with many industry-standard testing modules. PacketExpert can also be used as an in-line wirespeed network tap capable of monitoring traffic at up to 10 Gbps across copper or fibre optic networks. PacketScan™ is a powerful protocol analyzer suited for IP networks and VoIP analysis”, said Vijay Kulkarni, CEO of GL Communications.
