The type(s) of network traffic can affect the performance of a gigabit Ethernet network.
Gigabit Ethernet is a local area networking technology that delivers units of data, known as packets, at a rate of 1 billion bits, or 1 gigabit, per second. You can see what type of traffic is on gigabit Ethernet network by employing a variety of network traffic monitoring tools, although computer hardware often requires a degree of tuning, so that traffic can be captured and filtered without packets being dropped.
Tcpdump and Tcpflow
One of the most common tools for monitoring traffic on a gigabit Ethernet network is known as tcpdump. Tcpdump provides a standard, system-independent interface -- known as libpcap -- for capturing, decoding and filtering packets and, as such, is available for Unix and Windows operating systems. Tcpdump provides a summary of the data on a network at a particular time, but doesn't record the data for future analysis. However, a complementary network monitoring tool, known as a tcpflow -- which is also based on libpcap -- records the actual network data in a series of files, so that it can be reconstructed and analyzed at a later date.
Ethereal
Another network monitoring tool, known as Ethereal, allows you monitor data on a live gigabit Ethernet network, or examine data from a file previously captured by another program, such as tcpdump. Ethereal can reassemble all the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) packets -- TCP is the most common transport layer protocol used on gigabit Ethernet -- from an interchange between two network devices and present them to you through a graphical user interface.
SNMP
Many networking monitoring tools use the so-called Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) to collect and publish data from routers, which are devices that forward packets between networks. However, SNMP has some inherent disadvantages, as tools that rely on SNMP are typically restricted to network administrators, and detailed SNMP data is open to misinterpretation by anyone unfamiliar with the configuration of a router or the network as a whole. Unfortunately, some SNMP tools, such as Multi Router Traffic Grapher (MRTG) -- which is accessible by non-administrators -- only provide details of traffic load, not traffic type.
Considerations
Network resources are typically limited, so to use them as efficiently as possible, network administrators require information not only about how much traffic is transferred across a gigabit Ethernet network, but also what type of traffic is transferred. In other words, a network administrator must have access to reliable data, at individual packet level, from the interior of a gigabit Ethernet network if he is to have any chance of achieving the best performance from the network.
Tags: Ethernet network, gigabit Ethernet network, gigabit Ethernet, data from, gigabit Ethernet, gigabit Ethernet, monitoring tool