Cascade Pilot Software

Cascade Pilot enables seamless distributed network analysis, recording, visualization, monitoring, and reporting on Cascade Shark appliances. It can be connected to one or more Cascade Shark species to:

• Create multiple capture jobs on remote Cascade Shark appliances each capable of sustained multi-gigabit per second line-rate recording without packet drops
• Quickly and easily open and analyze remote or local multi-gigabyte trace files
• Quickly and easily analyze multiple, related traffic streams captured from multiple locations or sources to quickly identify where on the network performance issues are occurring
• Visualize and analyze long-duration local and remote traffic by moving back-in-time through trending data sets with just a few mouse clicks
• Easily isolate traffic of interest using drag-and-drop multi-level drill-down and an extensive collection of network analysis metrics
• Provide transaction-level analysis of HTTP, VoIP, FIX, MSSQL and MYSQL transactions
• Provide transaction-level analysis
• Define flexible triggers and alerts to detect abnormal behavior
• Create professional reports directly from views located on remote Cascade Shark appliances
• Seamlessly send selected traffic to Wireshark for deep packet inspection and decoding

Steelhead customers can easily enable packet capture and analysis wherever their Steelhead appliances are deployed, simply be adding Cascade Pilot. No additional hardware is necessary.

The seamless integration between Cascade Shark, Cascade Pilot and Wireshark provides a powerful, efficient, and cost-effective solution for troubleshooting complex or intermittent performance and security-related problems without having to transfer large files across the network. By continuously recording the packets traversing the network, rich troubleshooting details are always available when the IT staff needs them. As a result, the Cascade users achieve the following benefits:

• Enhanced IT productivity by avoiding lost time waiting for problems to reoccur
• Accelerated problem isolation and resolution
• Reduced down time and the effect it has on business productivity

Steelhead integration: Cascade Pilot™ enables Riverbed® Steelhead® appliance users to leverage their existing WAN optimization devices for remote packet capture and analysis, without adding additional hardware in the branch office. Cascade Pilot can remotely analyze trace files on Steelhead appliances without having to transfer gigabytes of information across the network.

Multiple Capture Jobs: Cascade Pilot Web Console is used to configure remote Cascade Shark appliances, including setting the parameters, starting, stopping, and removing capture jobs. Cascade Pilot can be used to create multiple capture jobs, each capable of sustained multi-gigabit per second line-rate recording without packet drops. Multiple capture jobs can dedicate differing amounts of storage to each job to flexibly extend storage time for critical applications. Web Console also supports TurboCap card configuration, user management, and protocol name and type definitions for application identification and classification.

Views: Cascade Pilot offers a broad selection of view metrics to meet troubleshooting requirements. Views include:

• LAN and network (MAC, VLAN, ARP, ICMP, DHCP, and DNS)
• Bandwidth usage (microbursts, IP, TCP, Web, and VoIP)
• Talkers and conversations (IP, subnets, countries, TCP, Web, VoIP, database, financial)
• Performance and errors (IP, TCP, Web, VoIP, database, financial)
• User activity (Web, VoIP, database, financial)
• 802.11 WLAN troubleshooting (discovery, bandwidth, channel usage, retransmissions, signal and noise)

Multi-Level Drill-Down: Drill-down is one of the most powerful and unique features in Cascade Pilot. Drill-down enables flexible top-down analysis by letting the user display the details of any chart selection. This powerful paradigm allows the user to quickly hone in on the specific packets needed to isolate anomalous network behavior, enabling very large trace files to be analyzed quickly and easily.

Multi-segment analysis: Cascade Pilot simplifies the task of correlating and analyzing related traffic streams captured from multiple locations or sources to quickly identify where on the network performance issues are occurring. Packet capture sources can include: Cascade Shark products, Steelhead appliances that have Cascade Shark embedded functionality or TCPdump), and third-party packet capture solutions, such as Wireshark, that support the standard pcap format.

Time Control: Viewing long duration network traffic metrics computed over days, weeks, and months can be challenging. With Cascade Pilot’s “back-in-time” capability, customers can easily move through view metrics over extended periods of time with just a few mouse clicks. Based on the selected time interval, sub-sampling and data aggregation techniques are used to optimize the granularity of the visual presentation of view metrics. The back-in-time capability can be applied to live and off-line traffic metrics.

Watches: Watches are a sophisticated triggering and alerting technology that can be created on virtually any view metric. When a trigger condition is met – for example, high bandwidth, slow server response time, high TCP round-trip time – an action is then executed. Actions include event logging, sending an email alert, and initiating a packet capture.

Multi-Terabyte Recordings: No more file rotation schemes resulting in thousands of files and inconvenient file boundaries representing a single recording. Cascade Pilot represents every packet recording, even if it's multiple terabytes in size, as one simple data item. Through the use of a powerful and intuitive drag-and-drop capability, the user can quickly and accurately isolate time intervals, called Trace Clips, within a recording and perform in-depth analysis and metric visualization on terabyte-size traffic recordings.

Reporting: Cascade Pilot offers an enhanced set of reporting capabilities that integrate fully with views, enabling the creation of professional reports directly from screen views. Reports can be created in a variety of formats including PDF, Word and Excel.

Wireshark Integration: Cascade Pilot is seamlessly integrated with Wireshark. Take advantage of Wireshark’s capture and display filters and expansive dissector library for deep packet analysis through the "Send to Wireshark" button.

Interactive and visually-oriented, the Cascade Pilot user interface is easy to use and accelerates problem identification.

Transaction-level and transport layer bounce charts show where delays are occurring

Cascade Pilot enables multi-segment analysis which simplifies the task of correlating and analyzing related traffic streams captured from up to 20 different locations or sources to quickly identify where on the network performance issues are occurring.

Web object load time views tell you how fast various objects take to load on a web site.

Cascade Pilot works on real-time packet captures on Shark or trace files.