International Business Machines Corporation

Agilent Technologies, Inc.

Napatech A/s

Deja Vu Networks, Inc.

Patrick V Johnstone

Russell L Couturier

William Alexander Bird

Vijay Dheap

Ben A Wuest

Alex Omø Agerholm

Joseph A Marino

Embodiments provide a system and method for network tracking. By using packet capture applications having a flow identifier and a time stamper, one or more raw packets from one or more packet flows intercepted from a network can be tagged with a unique identifier and timestamp that can later be used to aggregate packet flows that have been analyzed by one or more capture applications. The unique identifier can relate to the network interface of the particular capture application and can also have an increasing value, where the increase in value can be monotonic. Later capture applications, while capable of generating secondary timestamps, can disregard those secondary timestamps for the primary timestamp of the first capture application in order to remove complications arising from latency issues.

Persistent flow identifiers enabling disparate applications

Network traffic capture/replay systems, devices, apparatus, computer program code products and methods can include (1) extracting from the network traffic and scaling a plurality of sessions, (2) enabling asymmetrical scaling, wherein a client is cloned to generate a desired traffic load, (3) enabling complex scaling, wherein a captured packet may contain control sessions that control dependent sessions, wherein for each control session that is scaled, an additional stream session is scaled, (4) enabling traffic shaping, wherein the traffic shaping comprises parsing, categorizing and associating protocols associated with a packet capture file, and (5) enabling port mapping, wherein the port mapping comprises, prior to loading a packet capture file for replay, assigning source ports to each session.

Network traffic capture and replay with transaction integrity and scaling

A protocol sleuthing system according to the present invention for load testing a network server includes a computer configured to interconnect with the network server, a protocol engine stored in and implemented by the computer and operative to generate a plurality of synthetic users, to generate a synthetic transaction in accordance with a specified protocol, and to cause each of the plurality of synthetic users to sequentially implement a plurality of the synthetic transactions with the network sever for load testing thereof, a configuration file connected to the protocol engine that includes variables required to generate the synthetic transaction, information that defines the behavior of the plurality of synthetic users implementing the synthetic transaction, and information that defines the number of synthetic users to be created by the protocol engine, and a module that is operative to monitor each of the plurality of synthetic transactions implemented by each of the plurality of synthetic users with the network server, to detect any error event occurring during any of the plurality of synthetic transactions implemented by any of the plurality of synthetic users, and to report any error event detected during such network testing.

Protocol sleuthing system and method for load-testing a network server

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Southwick, MA, United States of America

Patrick V Johnstone