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Is the Volume of Network Traffic Too High?

If the NBA is connected at the wrong point in a network, it may ‘see’ more than just traffic destined for the Internet. Consequently, if individual packets from an email or file stream are missed, this will cause the entire stream capture to fail.

Note: You can filter this traffic by exempting specific IP addresses or port numbers, though this may not reduce traffic volumes sufficiently to solve the problem.

If the NBA is seeing too much traffic, the evidence will be in the form of dropped packets.

To check for dropped packets (Linux Server platforms with Napatech card only)

  1. Start a command shell either locally on the server or remotely over SSH.
  2. Enter the following commands:
    cd /opt/napatech3/bin
    ./monitoring
    
  3. Verify that this counter shows zero:
    Drop events     : 0x0000000000000000
    

To check for dropped packets (Bivio platform only)

  1. Generate a diagnostics file.
  2. From the resulting .gz file, extract cpu-info.txt.
  3. Open cpu-info.txt and check the 'QFull Drop' counts for each CPU

    A non-zero figure confirms that the NBA is dropping packets.