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Successful protocol analysis in modern network structures
Hunting the Invisible
A primary focus in virtualization is on simple processes, which can mean that actual validation and monitoring of critical parameters is not sufficiently considered. Virtualization also comes with the drawback of no longer being able to use the analysis tools you used to use because of the lack of data visibility. In this article, I show how to establish meaningful monitoring and analysis functions on the network, even when virtualization is involved.
A legacy protocol analysis tool (e.g., the open source utility Wireshark) is a standalone device or a piece of software on a PC that identifies problems, errors, and events relating to the network. Additionally, these tools contribute to determining the reasons for poor network performance by visualizing protocol information and the corresponding network activities.
Measuring Methods for Networks
Unfortunately, network and data center virtualization creates blind spots in your server infrastructure, as well as invisible networks. Because a major part of the traffic is routed via cloud infrastructure (in the form of virtual tunnel endpoints), this traffic does not even touch the physical networks in many cases. This means that administrators lose visibility into their data and, consequently, control over communication flows. For this reason, the data on the computer systems and networks need to be made visible again – and various tools are available for doing this.
SPANs
On switched networks, the data required for data analysis is not transferred to every port. The switch only forwards broadcasts and packets with unknown receiver addresses to all ports. If the switch has the MAC address of the receiver in its switch table, the packets in question are only sent to the port on the target device.
This necessitates new troubleshooting strategies. For this reason, most
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