Chapter 10

Expert Features

Automatic diagnostic analysis, expert data views, application response times, and expert alarms are referred to collectively as Surveyor Expert Features. The Expert Features are available only from Surveyor menus and toolbars if you have the Expert plug-in.

Surveyor observes the traffic on network segments, learns their unique characteris- tics, and constructs a database of network entities from the traffic it sees. Surveyor uses protocol decoding to learn about the connections, network stations, routing nodes, and subnetworks related to the frames in the buffer or capture file. From this information, Surveyor can detect potential problems on the network.

Problems detected by Surveyor are categorized as being either symptoms or anal- yses. When Surveyor detects an abnormal or unusual network event, it logs a symptom. A symptom indicates that a threshold has been exceeded and may indi- cate a problem on your network.

Several symptoms analyzed together, high rates of recurrence of specific symptoms, or single instances of particular network events causes Surveyor to conclude that the network has a problem. These are logged as analyses.

In addition to reporting significant problems, Surveyor provides helpful diagnostic information related to the symptom or analyses.

No configuration is required to begin using the expert logic; however, some of the default thresholds for expert events may be changed. Configuration settings are organized as a tree structure within a single window to allow for efficient and easy configuration changes.

In monitor mode, the expert system does not work with NDIS cards running in systems with Surveyor 3.2 or lower. Expert features will work on captures obtained from these devices.

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Finisar Surveyor manual Expert Features