NetVisualyzer from SGI

[Tony Farrow]

We are currently looking at the SGI NetVisualyzer Product to determine
if it would be of benefit to our Network Monitoring Group here. Although
we plan on performing a "full evaluation" later this fall I do have 
some questions .... Most of these questions will be formalized to our 
local SGI sales rep but some of you may have already have the answers...


1) I spoke with Larry Kung/Product Marketing Manager System Software
Division on whether there were any plans to migrate the NETSNOOP portion
of this software to any other PLATFORMS. ( Our installed base of SGI 
machines is currently low ). Larry said this was not in the plans? Anyone
else heard about this ....

2) In order to reduce the number of machines needed to perform snooping
I would like to have one machine with multiple ethernet cards ( maybe 4!)
perform the snooping and update the SGI Visualyzer station through another
ethernet interface. Has anyone tried this ? Think it is possible ?

3) One of our requirements for network tools is that they provide a method
of accessing them out-of-band. Therefore our diagnostic tools do not add to
any lan problems we may be using them to solve... (good idea but) it is 
possible to run SL/IP on the SGI machines? Run snoopstation data back to
the Visualyzer via SL/IP ??


4) The current NETSNOOP product allows paramaters to be passed to it such
that we can determine protocol matching. ie netsnoop -c 10 tcp.port=6000
to trap X-Server traffic. However other tools such as netgraph which use
netsnoop have no method of passing paramaters to netsnoop to use (of course
I may have not RTFMPC (.. man page correctly ;) and I have no manual). 
We have been able to mv netsnoop and replace it with a shell that fires up
the real netsnoop with the paramaters we want so netgraph really shows us
the traffic we wish to see. It would be nice to see a CAPTURE facility type
interface for netgraph (like the analyzer).

5) Plans for X-Windows ? We currently have a large base of X-Window 
compatible machines and seeing the NETVISUALYZER ported to X would
allow us to display ANALYZER/NETGRAPH screens remotely back to another display.
Any one know of a time-frame for this port ? Is SGI moving to an X
based platform ?


The product allows for an easy visualization of current network TRAFFIC.
The graphical interface is very slick and makes it extremely easy to 
SPOT potential problem areas that are not always entirely obvious through
a simple interfaces found in PC based lanalyzers. (At least not that I
have seen!.) 

Some of the User Interface needs work/ as well as a protocol toolkit 
which I believe is currently/will be developed which will allow you to
decode your own PROTOCOLS. 

Any information of course would be greatly appreciated. If anyone else
has seen/purchased/used the NETVISUALYZER your comments would be 
appreciated as well.

thx, 
tony

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| Tony Farrow              | NetNorth/BITNET: TONYF at BNR.CA          |
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