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By Duncan Orme, Technical Consultant
Have you ever wondered if there are TCP and UDP applications on your network that you don’t know about? If they are not automatically decoded by NetworkVantage and have not been defined by you, the end-user, they may not show up on your Vantage screens.
In the past, it hasn’t been so easy to learn about these ‘invisible’ applications. Analysis of the vdb file in Interactive View certainly gives you an understanding of which machines are talking to which and how much data is passing between them. However, this type of analysis will offer no clues as to what port a given application is talking on, for example.
Now NetworkVantage 9.8 can answer your questions about these applications. Simply allow the NetworkVantage probe to auto-define TCP and UDP applications once it sees a specified number of packets associated with a given application, then these applications will show up on Vantage screens and reports.
To take advantage of this feature, go to the NetworkVantage Console, select the Applications Menu, and then choose ‘Configure Applications’. This choice will open a dialogue box (see screen shot) on which you can select Application Decode Options, thereby determining which protocols the probe will decode and when.
At the bottom of this dialogue box there is a section labelled ‘Application auto-define settings’. Select the tick box to enable auto-definition of TCP and UDP applications, and then set the threshold for the number of packets that have to be seen by a NetworkVantage probe before it auto-defines a new application. We would recommend a threshold of 1,000 packets, so as to take into account any noise on the network. What this means is that once the NetworkVantage probe has seen 1,000 packets or more associated with a specific TCP or UDP application, it will assign that application an auto-defined number within the application definitions.
An auto-defined application appears on the Enterprise Manager and Probe Defined Applications report and is easily recognised by its name, which will have the form AutoTCP-2557.
For further information on this functionality, please refer to the Help available inside the NetworkVantage Console, under Application Decode Options.
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