Colasoft Blog

What is network baseline?

Do you know what your normal network throughput volume is, what types of traffic are most used in your network? If you can’t answer these questions then you should baseline your network. Network baseline is very important to network management because the data will tell you what it’s like when everything goes all right.

To baseline your network, you need software or hardware to listen on your network or a particular device. Both Colasoft nChronos and Capsa can be used to accomplish this task. Both of them are used to listen into packet data of a wire and generate all kinds of statistics on the network. To baseline a network, you need to use them to monitor the network traffic long enough, because a wider time span presents a more real picture of network traffic pattern. The use of network baseline is listed as follows:

• Understand healthy network pattern and traffic trends.

• Evaluate network management policies compliance.

• Understand how the network resources are allocated.

• Accelerate to troubleshoot network issues, i.e. abnormal traffic and spam traffic, etc.

• Provide data on network and security management to support decision making.

• Provide history statistics on network upgrade.
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If you use nChronos to monitor traffic on a core switch you will see lots of internal IP addresses, and also the Internet IP addresses. You can find that most of the Internet IP addresses are shown as their domain name, such as www.colasoft.com, and www.google.com, etc. Wouldn’t it be great if nChronos shows host names of our local machines, because they are much easier to understand, rather than just IP addresses? This tips article will show you how to use Name Table to display IP and MAC addresses as host names.

Suppose that there is a user, Steve, whose laptop has this IP address, 192.168.8.25, and you want nChronos to show his IP address as the text – Steve’s Laptop. First you run nChronos Console, connect to the server, right-click on the server name, and click Settings from the context menu. Then select Name Table on the Server Settings window.

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Colasoft Thanksgiving big sale is now online! You can get Capsa at the most favorable price. Get coupons of up to 40% off now by clicking here!

As the big holiday Thanksgiving is coming very soon, Colasoft are wishing all of our customers and software users a great Thanksgiving! It’s time to sharing and spreading happiness, to celebrate this great holiday, we are preparing a big sale to offer you the most cost-effective software. It is coming very soon and up to 40% discount for both Capsa network analyzer and Colasoft nChronos will be available.

Free trail of Capsa network analyzer and nChronos is available for download at our website www.colasoft.com.

In business network settings, network administrators manage a large number of devices, like laptops, desktops, printers, switches and routers and they all have IP and MAC addresses. When we use a network analyzer to monitor the network traffic on the network, we can see lots of IP and MAC addresses. These addresses, however, aren’t friendly to read so we’d like to show their host names or give them labels.

In Capsa we use Name Table to do this job for us. With name table we can not only label IP addresses but also MAC addresses and we can delete, export or reload the address items there. We can right-click on an IP address or MAC address and we see Add to name table in context menu.

On the dialog box we can give the IP (or MAC) address and alias, also we can choose a color for it. If we don’t know the host name, we can click Resolve address to automatically look up its host name. Then click OK to save the input.

Now back to Capsa and we can see the address is already replaced by the name alias we just created. The Add to name table function is applicable to any item on Node Explorer and all other views except Summary, Protocol and Report views.

If we need upgrade or reinstall Capsa, we can use Export function to back up the name items. Click Name Table icon on the ribbon, and click Export button to save the name table file. Then after installation or upgrade we can use the Import function to reload the name items back to the system.

We are very excited to release the availability of Capsa Network Analyzer7.5. Except for the enhanced user interface, the biggest highlight of Capsa Network Analyzer7.5 is TCP flow analysis which makes it easier for network administrators to analyze application performance and pinpoint critical performance issues.

Capsa Network Analyzer 7.5 presents a comprehensive high-level overview of application health on your network. From TCP transaction analysis, you can easily access to more detailed information, including TCP server/client response time, delay, retransmissions, and further down to the server flow to observe the actual media content of the flow. “This unparalleled level of control and visibility speeds time to resolve application problems and minimize overall network downtime,” said Ocean Yu, Vice President at Colasoft.

In addition to MSN and Yahoo Messenger monitor, Capsa Network Analyzer 7.5 added ICQ monitor to meet the market demands. ICQ logs can be easily found at the log tab where detailed information is vividly displayed. Moreover, RADIUS protocol is supported as a new member in the more than 300 protocol analysis family.

Top Highlights of Capsa Network Analyzer 7.5:

1. Powerful TCP flow analysis for application performance optimization
2. Add ICQ monitor to analyze and log ICQ activities
3. Support RADIUS protocol analysis
4. Intuitive TCP transaction sequence diagram
5. Enhanced user interface & performance

Capsa 7.5 runs under Windows XP/2003/2008/Vista/7. A trial version is available for download.

Today we are very happy to announce the release of nChronos Free, the industry’s first retrospective network analysis freeware and rapid continuous network traffic capturing and analysis solution which offers great capabilities in troubleshooting real-time networks and fastest drilling down to back-in-time network analysis to thousands of network professionals.

nChronos Free enables network administrators and professionals to realize high-speed massive network packet real-time capture and record, provides efficient data mining, in-depth network traffic analysis, drill down to isolate performance issues and troubleshooting high-priority and critical network issues. nChronos Free offers home offices or SMB who could not afford costly network analysis solutions the capability of remote data capturing, efficient network troubleshooting, application and device performance evaluation and optimization.

“The advanced capabilities of nChronos Free are very essential to enterprises or organizations whose networks are challenged by growing network traffic and performance expectations, said Roy Luo, CEO at Colasoft. “nChronos Free make it easy for network professionals to maintain a well-performed and productive network by quickly pinpointing critical network issues”.

“Network professionals are not only able to capture network traffic in real-time and display detailed statistics including protocols, network utilization, and so on, but also to view analysis results of any specific time duration, benchmark the network performance, and audit network user activities with forensics from the historical network traffic”, said Eddie Gao, CTO at Colasoft. “By continuously recording network traffic for back-in-time analysis, all critical network issues that threaten network performance and network security would be proactively resolved”.

Key Features of nChronos Free

Perform 7×24 real-time packet capturing to storage for application and network forensics analysis and back-in-time troubleshooting
Efficient drill-down for traffic data-mining and index for rapid data retrieval and application isolation
Provide detailed statistics of protocols, IP/TCP conversations, network utilization to baseline and visualized trends of network performance
Monitor critical events on any critical links with customizable alerts
In-depth network traffic analysis to optimize performance

nChronos retrospective network analysis freeware is available for download HERE .

It is one of the essential duties for network administrators to monitor their network traffic like HTTP traffic to see what applications are running on the network. There are countless network traffic monitor tools in the market which make us dazzling and hard to choose. Except for those costly network monitors, Capsa Free is a totally network freeware which serves much better than common network monitors in monitoring network traffic like HTTP traffic.

This article is mainly to guide you through the steps of how to monitor HTTP traffic with Capsa Free.

Capsa Free is a must-have freeware network analyzer for network monitoring, network troubleshooting and network analysis. It provides users with great experience to learn how to monitor network activities, pinpoint network problems,enhance network security and so on. Moreover, Capsa Free is a perfect choice for students, teachers and computer geeks to learn protocols and networking technology knowledge.

Step 1: Download and install Capsa Free.
Step 2: Initiate Capsa Free, choosing HTTP Analysis as the analysis profile.

Step 3: View the HTTP traffic statistics in different tabs of Capsa Free.

a. Summary view: overall statistics of the capture.
b. Log view: webpage visiting records (anyone visited a website, logged here).
c. Dashboard view: important statistic data showing in visualized charts.
d. Diagnosis view: auto detected network errors.
e. Protocol view: the applications/protocols running on the network, traffic statistics.
f. Physical Endpoint & IP Endpoint views: traffic volume statistics of each node (by MAC address or IP address).
g. IP Conversation, TCP Conversation & UDP Conversation views: statistics on two communication nodes (from layer 3 to layer 4).
h. Matrix view: map of how hosts are communicated (MAC or IP addresses).

For the different tabs view, please click here.

May 31, 2011, Colasoft, the leading provider of innovative network analysis solutions, today announces the launch of nChronos retrospective network analysis software, providing customers with great capabilities to troubleshoot high performance networks and pinpoint critical performance & application issues.

As a brand new retrospective product, nChronos’ release has poured fresh and great power to Colasoft Network Analysis Technology. It performs massive packet capturing and recording, efficient data mining and in-depth network traffic analysis to empower customers the capability of visualizing the overall enterprise network activities, drilling down to isolate performance issues and troubleshooting high-priority and critical network issues. Furthermore, it consists of servers and consoles to achieve expediently remote data capture, decoding and analysis for efficient network troubleshooting, application and device performance evaluation and optimization.

“With nChronos, IT professionals are able to view a specific window of time to troubleshoot network problems, benchmark the network performance, and audit network user activities with forensics from the historical network traffic”, said Eddie Gao, CTO of Colasoft, “Exclusively, nChronos provides scalable mass storage capacity varies from 1TB to unlimited storage for packets and statistics retrieval to meet the customizable network requirements”.

Features of nChronos retrospective network traffic software:

7×24 real-time packet capturing and recording for forensics analysis
Retrospectively analyze historical traffic of any time period
Baseline and visualized trends of network performance
Critical links monitoring & alerting
In-depth network traffic analysis to optimize performance
Efficient drill-down for traffic data-mining & index

An evaluation copy of nChronos retrospective network analysis software is available. Click here to request.

Author: David M Williams

Colasoft Capsa WiFi has just released for one month, and it is now firstly reviewed by David M Williams from IT Wire, a professional editor who articularly specialises in mergers and acquisitions and enterprise applications. Let’s enjoy his review.

WiFi traffic is, by nature, more ethereal than its wired equivalent. Specialised tools are necessary to diagnose wireless network faults, and Colasoft has extended its excellent Capsa line with a new product to sniff and analyse your WiFi network.

As with other tools in Colasoft’s range, Capsa WiFi is a packet sniffer which stands out from the competition by its superb user interface. There are no cryptic or arcane command lines to worry about.

Instead, Windows-basd network administrators can interrogate and inspect raw packet data through a clean, Microsoft Office-style GUI that turns normally complex tasks into straightforward drop-down lists and menu options.

Capsa WiFi understands the gamut of 802.11 protocols and can listen in on any connectible access point that your laptop can reach. You might wish to plug into a cabled network because Capsa WiFi will disconnect you from any WiFi connections in order to do its work. However, it is capable of sniffing traffic across multiple WiFi networks provided they use the same station ID.

Network analysis, by nature, involves vast amounts of data flying by so it is essential for a tool to save data to a buffer, and to allow the user to hone in on the information that matters. Capsa WiFi provides a range of easy to use filters and rules that make this very simple, but effective.

Capsa WiFi weighs in at $USD 699.00 but the product can pay for itself when used on a network of reasonable size and complexity.

Among the many uses of a packet sniffer are to diagnose network intrusions, troubleshoot DHCP problems, analyse network utilisation, uncover reasons for slow network performance, analyse broadcast traffic, raise unattended alerts on abnormal traffic and many other things.

While other network analysis tools exist, Capsa WiFi stands out – as with the rest of the Colasoft range – by its excellent user interface and rich feature suite.