Understanding the Traffic Analysis Agents
Traffic Analysis agents enable you to monitor a heterogeneous LAN environment comprised of Ethernet, FDDI, and token ring segments from the easy-to-use Novell ZENworks Server Management interface.
Traffic Analysis agents are RMON agents that can run on a NetWare server, Windows server, or a Windows workstation. They implement a set of functionality defined by the RMON MIB (RFC 1757). These agents collect information about activity on your network and make it available to Novell ConsoleOne via SNMP.
The following functionality is provided by the Traffic Analysis Agents:
- Monitor the performance of segments and provide vital network statistical information to Novell ConsoleOne
- Make it easy to set alarm thresholds for proactive network management
- Capture all packets or selected packets to help you diagnose and resolve problems on the monitored networks
- Monitor multiple network segments including the Symmetric Multi-Processing (SMP) architecture
- Monitor network segments for problems, such as high network utilization and communication errors
- Track dynamic IP address assignments from the DHCP server to the nodes on the network
- Store data to display real-time trends (hourly) and historical trends (daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly) for statistics such as Total Bytes, Total Packets, Good Packets, Error Packets, and so forth
- Monitor nodes for inactivity, so that you are alerted if the monitored nodes becomes inactive
The following figure illustrates the functionality of traffic analysis agents.
Novell ZENworks Server Management includes the following traffic analysis agents:
- Traffic Analysis Agent for NetWare.
For details, see Using the Traffic Analysis Agent for NetWare.
- Traffic Analysis Agent for Windows.
For details, see Using the Traffic Analysis Agent for Windows.
The Novell ZENworks Server Management traffic analysis agents are RMON Plus agents. For details, see Functionality of RMON Plus Agents. These agents also implement the first two RMON2 groups. The first RMON2 group is the Protocol Directory group, which provides a table of protocols for which the agent will monitor and maintain statistics. The second RMON2 group is the Protocol Distribution group, which provides a table of statistics for each protocol in the directory. For details, see Functionality of RMON2 Agents.