GL Announces new Wirespeed Packet Capture Application

GL Communications has just launched a new wirespeed packet capture application called "PacketScanPX™". This application leverages two of GL's best-selling products: PacketExpert™ 10GX and PacketScan™. It can capture IP traffic at up to 10 Gbps and analyze thousands of protocols including Voice over IP (VoIP) signaling and traffic.

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Overview

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 fiber optic networks. PacketScan™ is a powerful protocol analyzer suited for IP networks and VoIP analysis.

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.


PacketScanPX™ Hardware Filters

Wirespeed Packet Filters

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Capture Traffic of Interest


PacketScanPX™ includes a powerful wirespeed filter that allows users to filter out unwanted traffic, and continuously capture/analyze the traffic of interest.

Some of the main features of the wirespeed packet filter are listed below:

  • Filter packets and analyze packets of interest
  • Filters can be set to each field (Packet Mode) and to each bit in the packet (Raw mode) for greater flexibility
  • Up to 16 filters can be defined per port. Each filter supports filtering on the following fields:
    • Source/Destination MAC Address, Ethernet Len/Type field
    • VLAN ID/Priority
    • MPLS Label
    • IP Source/Destination Address, ToS/DS field, Protocol field
    • UDP Source/Destination Ports
    • TCP Source/Destination Ports
    • Frame Size
    • Raw hex bytes/mask of 120 bytes length along with an offset
  • Each field can be set to match to a fixed value or Range of values
  • A 'Not' feature is available for each filter – user can either capture a packet that matches the filter or capture all packets that do not match the filter

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 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

For comprehensive information, please refer to the PacketScanPX website.


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