LoveMyTool - Open Community for Network Management and Monitoring

Analyze VoFi With WildPackets (by Jay Botelho)

With all the hype around gigabit wireless - 802.11ac (scheduled for ratification in early 2014) and 802.11ad (ratified December 2012), the delivery of new services like Voice over Wireless (VoFi) is sure to grow in popularity, not only for consumers, but in the enterprise as well. Handing a few simultaneous calls on a home network is not much of a challenge, but handling 10 – 50 simultaneous calls per AP in an enterprise setting, all while continuing to deliver wireless data feeding ever-more-demanding applications, is most certainly a challenge, hence the limited deployment so far. But with much faster wireless network speeds just around the corner, services like VoFi are ready for primetime.

VoFi can provide a real benefit in the workplace, especially in highly mobile environments buried deep inside buildings, like hospitals, warehouses, and customer service in large box stores. To serve mobile workers today, these industries often use cellular technology, but coverage issues within these facilities significantly reduce call quality, not to mention the cost of service for each cell phone. With VoFi, APs can be placed to ensure optimum call quality throughout the facility, reducing dropped calls and significantly increasing customer satisfaction. And all this for a fixed cost, just the handsets and the APs, with no additional monthly charges.

Whether or not your organization has picked up on the VoFi trend yet, gigabit wireless will be the enabler for many organizations to jump on board. Below are suggested steps for network monitoring and analysis with VoFi, so you can be ready when the time comes.

Application Performance Monitoring is all about the Users (by Jay Botelho)

Whether your users are accessing email from a local server, browsing the web, or working with applications running in a virtual server (local or as-a-service), it’s imperative to constantly track and monitor these events for all users on your network. In other words, you need to be performing Application Performance Monitoring (APM). And this doesn’t need to be complex – it can be as simple as noticing which IP conversations and what activities are “normal” for each user. By uncovering and recording this information, you’ll have everything you need to quickly determine when the user experience heads south.

A key metric to monitor as part of this “normal” behavior is Application Response Time, a quantitative measurement determining when applications are experiencing poor performance. Although quantitative, measurements of application response time can be made in different ways, and from different measurement points, leading to ambiguity as to exactly what is being measured. But in most cases application response time will give you a very good idea about the overall user experience, and that’s the primary goal in APM. It’s when it comes to the next step, determining the root cause of the problem, when the details of how and where the measurements are made really come into play.

Packet Capture in a Virtual Environment (By Jim MacLeod)

Spend enough time around virtualization and it becomes clear: these were tools built for server folks, and the networking was added on as a necessary evil to move data. The focus within VM network configuration is simplicity rather than actual control, and critical monitoring stats are next to non-existent. Fortunately, things have gotten better: Open vSwitch supports port mirroring, and the feature was added to VMware in version 5. Grab your favorite packet sniffer and read on to learn about sniffing VM networks.

Scenario 1: Inter-VM in the same server

The simplest VM scenario is a single server, and already there’s traffic that’s traditionally been hard to sniff. Packets between VMs in the same server almost never leave the box, which means that a tap or a physical switch span port isn’t going to work.

Fortunately, there are two straightforward solutions. First, the virtual switch itself may support a span port. That means that it should be possible to designate a NIC on the vswitch as the target for the sniffed traffic. This gives two choices: either designate a vNIC on a VM on the server, or designate a pNIC to forward the packets to an external sniffer.

VoIP Call Quality Tracking (by Patrick Hubbard)

Once unproven technology deployed by only the largest organizations, Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) is becoming an everyday responsibility of many IT and network administrators. Small and medium-sized businesses in particular can reduce their telecommunications costs and increase flexibility by converting an unwieldy TelCo/PBX problem into just another service on the network. The biggest remaining challenge for VoIP administrators regardless of the number of extensions is assuring high call quality.

While there has been significant progress made in improving the quality of service for VoIP calls, quality is still generally lower than that provided by Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN) networks. Corporate IT and accounting are drawn to VoIP based on the economics, but to most users, a phone is a phone. They expect the quality of PSTN. As a result, network administrators looking for successful user adoption of a VoIP system must keep a close eye on the actual call quality users experience.

Managing Real-time Data on Your Network – Back to Basics (by Jay Botelho)

VoIP and Real Time management basics!

Voice over IP (VoIP) is already a business necessity, and video over IP is fast on its heels. The growth of video on IP networks is astounding, and the sum of all forms of video (TV, video on demand [VoD], Internet, and P2P) will be approximately 86% of global consumer traffic by 2016 (see this Cisco paper for details). Though a necessity, the real-time nature of voice and video traffic is often at odds with traditional network traffic, creating undo angst in your IT department. Real-time data, especially video, can bog down enterprise networks and make it difficult to perform mission-critical tasks.

With all this real-time data competing for network bandwidth we need to get back to the basics. Use the right tools for the job, tackle the three VoIP killers - latency, jitter, and packet loss, and effectively manage the end-user experience. Fortunately, there’s no need to reinvent the wheel here. Everything you need is readily available on the market today.

Let’s take a closer look at some of the challanges -   

The Right Tools for the Job

Before we can determine the tool, we need to determine the job. Given the maturity of VoIP today, the job is typically ongoing monitoring and troubleshooting for most organizations. But for the sake of completeness, or for those situations where a VoIP upgrade may be in the plans, let’s address the entire VoIP lifecycle, which includes a pre-deployment assessment, deployment and maintenance.

On-the-Fly Network Analysis at 10G - Are You Crazy? (By Jay Botelho)

With traditional network analysis on a 1 Gigabit (1G) network, you had a lot of flexibility. If a problem occurred on your network, you simply connected your network analyzer, started a trace, and determined the problem. If the problem occurred in the past, you would attempt to replicate the problem and solve the issue, or perhaps just wait for it to happen again. But with 10G there’s way too much data to operate in this “point and shoot” mode.

Instead of operating in the reactive way you did with 1G, you need a different approach when handling your 10G networks. With 10G, you need to identify key analysis points, put equipment in place that can monitor 24/7 while both reporting real-time key performance indicators and saving all network data for forensic analysis, and record network data at your peak data rate with zero data loss – always! When a problem is detected, you’ll already have the data stored and you can simply rewind data (rather than waste valuable time replicating the problem), analyze that data, and identify the root cause of the issue.

Three Cool Things You Can Do with Compass Live (by Chris Bloom)

As network traffic continues to increase, it is even more important to have a tool that helps network engineers pinpoint where issues are occurring on their network, in both real time and post capture, for deeper network analysis. For this reason, WildPackets created Compass Live, a real-time interactive dashboard for analyzing wired and wireless networks. Compass Live has a series of interactive graphs that provide visualization into everything from overall utilization of the network to top protocols and nodes with both .pkt (from WildPackets) and .pcp (from Wireshark) trace files.

We launched a Beta version of our project during the summer, and received a lot of great user feedback. Below are a few of the key features that beta users found of particular interest.

Wireless Signal Strength

For wireless networks, Compass Live offers a unique signal strength graph. To do this, simply change the graph to “Signal” and you will see the average signal strength of your network over time. Like all the graphs provided in this dashboard, you have the ability to dissect signal strength, and view it from a protocol or particular node viewpoint, making it easy to troubleshoot signal strength problems for specific users or access points.

Beware of Vendors Promising 802.11n (by Tony Fortunato)

 

 

I can't believe the problems I have had trying to get my 802.11n card working in my new laptops.

I ordered 3 Gateway laptops for the lab late last year. One of the reasons I got them was to beef up my 802.11n wireless classes and material as well as general hardware refresh.

I have been using them for about 4 months without a problem. I finally got some time to work on some of the 802.11n WIFI stuff the other week when I noticed that the laptops only saw and connected to my 2.4 Ghz b/g network.  I could not connect, nor see the SSID of the 5.8 Ghz/80.211n network. After researching the problem online and referencing the Atheros chipset, I decided to call support since my drivers were current and I was out of ideas.

I was surprised how little the vendors' technical support line knew about WIFI and the amount of misinformation they were trying to sell me. The red flag for occured when they explained that the only difference between 5.8 and 2.4 Ghz, is price.  I wish you could see my eyes rolling back and that vien along my forehead enlarge.

Everyone I spoke to, initally blamed my access points and network. I explained that I tried to connect to 3 different 802.11n AP's from different vendors in my lab with no luck and do not even see the 5.8Ghz SSID's.  I also explained that my Dell is on the 802.11n network with no poblems so I doubt the AP's are to blame. 

VOIP and Traffic Generation Tip (by Tony Fortunato)

Here I chat about some of the differences between VOIP and Data networks as well as a good old traffic generation tip.

 

 

Enjoy

I Don't Need No Tools ... (by Tony Fortunato)

Just one of those comments I hear too often.

With this kind of logic, auto dealership mechanics shouldn't need tools either - since the cars are all new ;b

In this talk I try to explain via an example, of when you would need tools.

Enjoy

 

Continue reading other LoveMyTool posts by Tony Fortunato »