I hate network performance testing because it's so ellusive in it's typical
"moving target" nature and different interpretations that can be derived
from the data you do collect.
Nevertheless, network performance analysis depends on baselining and
analysis of historical data, which means you need two components, data
collection equipment and data analysis equipment.
You will also need a sedative and a confortable chair as you decipher the
data you do collect to keep from going insane.
For data collection I recomend net scout products. You can get these at
www.netscout.com.
I would also recommend distributed sniffers for those moments when you need
an immediate snap shot of activity to put out fires.
For analysis, I recommend the net scout software, but also a good sniffer
software package, and a back-end database like SQL or Oracle. Having
extensive knowledge of protocols, frames, and all layers of network
operations is a must.
Most of all I reccomend: THINK, just because a book will tell you that a
certain condition means you have a problem means that thier explanation is
actually the problem. It might be that the application you are using is
actually using short bursty traffic as opposed to long persistent traffic,
and your clog is really being caused by an unstable network being burdend by
spanning tree or routing convergence. In practice, never ever, isolate on
the traffic that isn't performing correctly and expect to get an answer, you
have to analyize the entire make up of the traffic, including routing
protocol updates, BPDU's, etc.
I personally hate network performance problems because they can be so
elusive, and sometimes there is no single problem that is causing the issue,
and sometimes, fixing one thing, only adds bandwidth to make another
unidentified problem worse, so management think's you are green and don't
know what you are doing.
It's alot like the highway system, traffic, good or bad, will always expand
to fit into the pipe it's given, your management needs to understand that
from the outset, or you are in for a long process of explanations as to why
you are not doing your job.
Good luck.
""Faisal Athar"" wrote in message
[EMAIL PROTECTED]">news:[EMAIL PROTECTED]...
> Hi Cisco Smarties ..!!
>
> Need your help Again!!
>
>
> Can you please recommend me some good tools to check the performance of
> network.i.e Access/Distribution/Core layer response times
> and throughputs etc..
>
> our network is running with Cat6 and 7200 series equipments.
>
> Thanks for the help.
>
>
> Faisal.
>
> Faisal Athar
> On the Way to CCIE..
>
>
>
>
>
> #The oNLY People who never succeded are#
> ### Only those who never Try
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