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Network Monitoring and Troubleshooting for Dummies - Compliments of Riverbed

Network Monitoring and Troubleshooting for Dummies

Networks are complex. Your network performance management shouldn’t be!

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Cascade Shark Appliance

High Performance Network Traffic Recording and Analysis

Riverbed® Cascade Shark, formerly known as the CACE Shark appliance, is a turnkey hardware and software solution providing high-performance, multi-gigabit per second, network traffic analysis, recording, monitoring, and reporting.

“It was taking us hours and hours to capture, decode and get to bottom line information for particular customers. With Cascade, we’re now able to do it in less than 20 minutes.”
—Avi Lonstein, CEO, AireSpring

Based on high-performance 1GbE and 10GbE capture cards, Cascade Shark is capable of sustained, multi-gigabit per second recording of network traffic without packet drops.
Cascade Shark provides an effective and indispensable tool for the manipulation and in-depth analysis of multi-terabyte network traffic recordings.
Fully integrated with Wireshark, Cascade Shark supports packet filtering based on Wireshark BPF and Wireshark Display filters.
Cascade Shark appliance seamlessly integrates with Cascade Pilot supporting an intuitive drag-and-drop multi-level drill down for local and remote network analysis and troubleshooting.

Cascade Customer success story: AireSpring »

Wireshark Within

Cascade Shark includes the only network analysis software fully integrated with Wireshark, the world’s most popular network protocol analyzer. This integration makes the prodigious collection of Wireshark Display Filters available for use within the network analysis software engine. Using the visual selection and drill-down features of Cascade Pilot, the “Send to Wireshark” feature is used to export only the selected subset of the traffic to Cascade Pilot for detailed packet protocol inspection with Wireshark.

Global Network Visibility

By placing Cascade Shark appliances at strategic vantage points in your network you will significantly improve your network visibility in geographically distributed network locations. The number and placement of Cascade Shark appliances will be determined by factors such as your distributed network architecture, mission-critical applications, traffic recording needs, and security design.

Traffic Capture

Cascade Shark includes Shark Packet Recorder which is capable of continuous recording of multi-gigabit per second network traffic to disk without packet drops. The Shark Packet Recorder is a customized dump-to-disk utility based on the 1GbE and 10GbE TurboCap cards and a RAID-enhanced and specially designed packet storage system.

Retrospective Analysis

No more awkward file rotation schemes resulting in thousands of files and file boundaries representing a single recording. A multi-terabyte packet recording is represented as a single “virtual file” in Cascade Pilot and, through the use of a powerful and intuitive drag-and-drop graphical user interface, the user can quickly isolate arbitrary time intervals of interest within a recording and perform in-depth analysis and traffic visualization. Trending/Indexing data is also available for high-speed analysis of terabyte traffic recordings.

Troubleshooting

Cascade Shark supports a wide variety of network protocols and traffic analysis metrics (called Views) to meet all of your monitoring, reporting, and troubleshooting needs. Views can be applied to live traffic on Cascade Shark’s local network interfaces or to off-line network traces stored in Cascade Shark’s storage system.
Typical Views include:

  • LAN and Network troubleshooting (MAC, VLAN, ARP, ICMP, DHCP, DNS)
  • Bandwidth usage (including micro-bursts, IP, TCP, WEB, VoIP)
  • Talkers and conversations (IP, subnets, countries, TCP, WEB, VoIP)
  • Performance and errors (IP, TCP, Web, VoIP)
  • User activity (Web, VoIP)

Performance Monitoring

Cascade Shark supports “Watches,” a sophisticated triggering and alerting technology. A Watch consists of a trigger condition on a View metric and a set of actions to be carried out whenever the trigger condition is met. You can, for example, be alerted on high bandwidth usage, slow server response time, high TCP round trip time, and much more. When a Watch running on a Cascade Shark detects that a threshold has been crossed, Cascade Shark will execute one or more actions. The available actions include sending an email/Twitter message and starting/stopping a capture job.

Data Navigation

The seamless interaction between Cascade Pilot and Cascade Shark supports the innovative Time Control technology, whereby a user can move through View metrics calculated over extended periods of time with just a few mouse clicks. Based on the selected time interval, advanced subsampling and data aggregation techniques are used to optimize the granularity of the visual presentation and minimize the bandwidth usage between the remote Cascade Shark appliance and Cascade Pilot.

Professional Reports

Cascade Shark supports enhanced report generation from displayed Views. Upon request from Cascade Pilot, Cascade Shark generates the data for a report based on one or more Views. The report data is then sent to Cascade Pilot for rendering and immediate presentation.

Seamless Integration with Cascade Pilot

Cascade Pilot is capable of accessing and controlling one or more remote Cascade Shark appliances.

Find Out More About Cascade Pilot

Related Content

Introduction to Cascade Shark and Cascade Pilot Webinars

Join us for a live, interactive demonstration of the powerful, unique features of Cascade Shark and Cascade Pilot every Wednesday. In these 60-minute sessions we will demonstrate the UI, features, and various use-cases for our high-performance, high-fidelity data capture and analysis platform that fully integrates with Wireshark.
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