GL’s FastRecorder™ and PacketExtractor™ for Monitoring 1/10/25/40/100 Gbps IP Networks

FastRecorder and PacketExtractor

Welcome to another issue of GL's Newsletter providing information on our new products, FastRecorder™ and PacketExtractor™ . These new applications are designed for error free, wirespeed, packet capture, recording, and analysis at 1, 10, 25, 40, and 100 Gbps interconnected networks - wireless and wired. Along with PacketScan™ HD and WireShark, the Portable unit is the ultimate in extreme high speed, wirespeed capture, and analysis of IP protocols.

Today’s networks are built with switches, routers, and gateways interconnected with 1, 10, 25, 40, and 100 Gbps full duplex fiber optic lines. These fiber connections increasingly carry packets (vs. circuits) with data, voice, and video, interleaved, aggregated, and burst out at ever faster, bigger, and longer distances.

Diagnosing issues among these elements requires error free, non-intrusive interception at the full rate (wirespeed), then storing for post analysis with a packet analyzer. Naturally, at such high rates, capturing and storing require a unique and ingenious architecture, large RAM, and hundreds of terabytes of storage. Additional features, like wirespeed filtering, packet slicing, storing, and later extracting intended application streams are also vital.

GL’s portable (or rackmount) FastRecorder™ and PacketExtractor™ is specifically meant for such purposes. FastRecorder™ is a dedicated application for easy interconnection to multiple interfaces, easy configuration, and subsequent wirespeed, continuous, error free capture to a large disk (NVME SSDs) for long periods of time. Capture can also be combined with wirespeed filtering and packet slicing.

PacketExtractor™ can then extract packets of interest, by defining complex filters, streams, time periods, storage size, and even portions of packets, such as headers, and many other useful parameters for diagnosing problems. The extracted chunks/files can be in PCAP, PcapNG, or HDL (GL’s proprietary) format for analysis.

FastRecorder™ and PacketExtractor™ applications work with GL’s PacketScan™ HD (or Wireshark®) Packet Analyzers. GL’s HD is a complete IP traffic analyzer – similar to but more powerful than Wireshark®. For example, real time voice quality, fax quality, call and session separation, powerful ladder diagrams are included.


Main Features

  • FastRecorder™:
    • Lossless wirespeed capture of IP traffic across high speed (1, 10, 25, 40, and 100 GigE) links
    • Non-intrusive capture and record over Ethernet (Electrical and Optical) interfaces at nano-second time precision
    • Recording on multiple ports by merging the traffic with high-precision timestamp
    • Up to 120 TB of total storage (NVME SSD) in the portable platform
    • Record only traffic-of-interest by applying efficient hardware filters based on MAC, 802.1Q (VLANs), IPv4/IPv6, TCP, UDP, SCTP SIP, and RTP parameters
    • Filter on inner layer of GTP tunnel traffic like inner IPv4/IPv6 addresses
    • Slice packets to limited length to store only important packet content
    • Optimized distributed disk operation to achieve wirespeed recording to disk
    • Option to record traffic continuously by retaining the latest traffic with user defined record size
    • Aggregated and per port statistics like captured, filtered/unfiltered, dropped frame percentage and counts
  • PacketExtractor™:
    • Extract intended traffic from previous recordings into PCAP, PcapNG (Wireshark® format), or HDL (GL Proprietary format) output traces
    • Extracted trace can be analyzed in PacketScan™ HD (HDL file format) or Wireshark® (PCAP file format)
    • Option to extract the packets into single or multiple output traces
    • Extraction filter provides option to filter IP, TCP, UDP, GTP-IP, GTP-UDP, and other protocols
    • Extract traces with file size, time period, or packet count as the limit criteria
    • Packets can be sliced to limited length to optimize output trace size
    • Option to compress extracted trace files using 7-Zip to optimize storage

Hardware Filtering: The Hardware Filter option allows user to easily set up filter conditions to filter out unwanted traffic at line rate, continuously capture only the traffic of interest, and modify filters on the fly.

As shown in the below image, Hardware filter filters GTP-U traffic for the specific GTP-IPV4 address

FastRecorder™ Hardware Filter View

FastRecorder™ Hardware Filter View

FastRecorder™ statistics provides aggregated and per port statistics as shown below.

FastRecorder™ Statistics View

FastRecorder™ Statistics View

PacketExtractor™ configuration for extracting the packets to PcapNG trace format with duration as limit criteria.

PacketExtractor™ Configuration View

PacketExtractor™ Configuration View


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