Planning for Network Growth

How the Network Performance Advisor Collects Data

Keeping the historical data about each conversation on a network requires a large amount of disk space. HP has developed a patented technique for greatly reducing the amount of data collected by using a statistical sampling of network traffic. Statistical sampling is the appropriate method for detecting the major contributors to traffic on the network because most network problems are caused by a few nodes that generate the most packets, the most errors, or use a large portion of the available bandwidth. Information about interesting traffic can easily be separated from the noise or traffic coming from the majority of nodes that only send small amounts of data.

HP’s sampling method is based on randomly sampling network traffic and has been mathematically proven to work under all network conditions. The traffic is correctly attributed to the nodes that are creating it. Because of this random sampling method you don’t need to provide a sampling interval to the Network Performance Advisor.

Traffic Data Collector Performance

You can specify the amount of system resources that the data collector can use. A more detailed network analysis requires more availability of system resources. The selections are:

High Resource Availability—Recommended for systems dedicated to network management. The default setting.

Medium Resource Availability—Recommended for systems that run other less performance-sensitive applications.

Low Resource Availability—Recommended for systems that run perfor- mance-sensitive applications.

To access this page, select the Performance button in the HP TopTools navigation frame, then click on Traffic Data Collector Settings. Select the Performance tab.

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