Overview

Packet capture and analysis is crucial for managing large and small-scale networks. Tools to capture and replay are often useful for service providers who wish to make field captures of crucial behaviour and want to carefully reproduce them in a lab.

Recorded high speed data can be used not only for examining each packet in real-time, but also examining trends across packets or streams of related packets to predict potential issues or potential illicit activity. Playing back the recorded high-speed data can recreate the real-time packet network in the lab for further diagnosis.

Today's networks are built with switches, routers, and gateways interconnected with 1, 10, 25, 40, and 100 Gbps full duplex fiber optic lines. These fiber connections increasingly carry packets (vs. circuits) with data, voice, and video, interleaved, aggregated, and burst out at ever faster, bigger, and longer distances.

Diagnosing issues among these elements requires error free, non-intrusive interception at the full rate (wirespeed), then storing for post analysis with a packet analyzer. Naturally, at such high rates, capturing and storing require a unique and ingenious architecture, large RAM, and hundreds of  terabytes of storage. Additional features, like wirespeed filtering, packet slicing, storing, and later extracting intended application streams are also vital.

GL's FastRecorder™ and PacketExtractor™ application allows Record and Extract modes of operation In Fast Record mode, high rate real-time traffic can be recorded with precise hardware time stamping. The Record feature includes a powerful Hardware Filter that allows user to filter out unwanted traffic, and continuously capture the traffic of interest. The application supports HDDAT GL HD Proprietary format.

In PacketExtractor™ mode, the recorded traffic file on selected network interface ports and drives can be extracted in the formats PCAP or PcapNG (Wireshark® format), or HDL (GL Proprietary format), and HDDAT (GL HD Proprietary format) and analyzed using any packet analyzer such as GL's PacketScan™. It also supports sequence number verification of extracted packets (BERT verification) Live traffic captured on a network using the Recorder utility, PacketScan™, or Wireshark® can be easily recreated in the lab.

FastRecorder™ and PacketExtractor™ applications work with GL's PacketScan™ HD (or Wireshark®) Packet Analyzers. GL's PacketScan™ HD is a complete IP traffic analyzer – similar to but more powerful than Wireshark®. For example, real time voice quality, fax quality, call and session separation, powerful ladder diagrams are included.

The traffic captured on a live network can be analyzed using packet analyzers such as PacketScan™ - All IP analyzer or Wireshark®.

Main Features

FastRecorder™

• Lossless wirespeed capture of IP traffic across high speed (1, 10, 25, 40, and 100 GigE) links
• Non-intrusive capture and record over Ethernet (Electrical and Optical) interfaces at nano-second time precision
• Recording on multiple ports by merging the traffic with high-precision timestamp
• Up to 120 TB of total storage (NVME SSD) in the portable platform
• Record only traffic-of-interest by applying efficient hardware filters based on MAC, 802.1Q (VLANs), IPv4/IPv6, TCP, UDP, SCTP, SIP, and RTP parameters
• Filter on inner layer of GTP tunnel traffic like inner IPv4/IPv6 addresses
• Slice packets to limited length to store only important packet content
• Optimized distributed disk operation to achieve wirespeed recording to disk
• Option to record traffic continuously by retaining the latest traffic with user defined record size
• Aggregated and per port statistics like captured, filtered/unfiltered, dropped frame percentage and counts

PacketExtractor™

• Extract intended traffic from previous recordings into PCAP, PcapNG (Wireshark® format), or HDL (GL Proprietary format) output traces
• Extracted trace can be analyzed in PacketScan™ HD (HDL file format) or Wireshark® (PCAP file format)
• Option to extract the packets into single or multiple output traces
• Extraction filter provides option to filter IP, TCP, UDP, GTP-IP, GTP-UDP, and other protocols
• Extract traces with file size, time period, or packet count as the limit criteria
• Packets can be sliced to limited length to optimize output trace size
• Option to compress extracted trace files using 7-Zip to optimize storage