FastRecorder™ and PacketExtractor™
for Monitoring IP Networks
GL's FastRecorder™ and PacketExtractor™ application allows recording and extracting modes of operation. In Fast Record mode, high rate real-time traffic can be recorded with precise hardware time stamping.
BrochureOverview
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 behavior 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.
The application includes four modules - FastRecorder™, PacketExtractor™, PacketRecorder™ , and PacketReplay™.
FastRecorder™ and PacketExtractor™ provide extreme wirespeed IP traffic filtering and recording up to 100 Gbps direct to disk and offline filtering, extraction, and analysis. Supports 4 x 1 Gbps or 2 or 4 x 1/10 Gbps or 2 x 25/40/100 or 8 x 10 Gbps Ethernet Interface.
PacketRecorder™ and PacketReplay™ provide record and playback of IP traffic up to 10 Gbps.
In FastRecorder™ 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
Specifications
Hardware Requirements | Requires GL's HD Network Interface adapters High Density Network Adapters can be any of the following types -
Hard Disk: SSD hard disk (For faster I/O operations) compatible with SATA verIII or RAM Disk. System Configuration: 2U system with 32 GB to 128 GB RAM |
Hardware Filters |
Supports defining up to 10 filters at Layer 2, 3, 4, and 5 |
Record Rate | Max Rate is 80Gbps |
FastRecorder™ Architecture
The traffic is captured on the selected port at the hardware level. The captured traffic will be timestamped and sent to the Host Buffer within the hardware. If the Hardware Filters are applied, then only the filtered traffic will be sent to the Host Buffer. In case of multiple port selection, the filtered traffic from the selected ports is aggregated and presented as a single stream.
The FastRecorder™ application has two modules such as Capture Module and Write Module. In the host buffer, the packets are segmented into different frames based on segment sequence number and segment sequence length and these stream of frames are captured from the selected network interface and the write module will save the captured traffic in the trace files in metadata format in to the SSD/RAM Disk.
PacketExtractor™ Architecture
The pre-recorded captured files (.dat format) stored in SSD/RAM disk will be fed to PacketExtractor™ application.
It reads the metadata file which contains the information of the recorded data on each drive with time stamp. The filters can be applied for extracting traffic of interest. The trace files segments are reassembled based on segment sequence number. The segment sequence number and segment length are used while analyzing or reassembling the segments.
The Extractor module extracts the packets from the reassembled segments. The write module will write the extracted packets to HDL or PCAP or PcapNG. The BERT verify option can be used to analyze the sequence number of extracted packets.
FastRecorder™ Application
FastRecorder™ application provides various options to capture the high density real-time traffic on disk drives and store the recorded traffic into a file. The application can capture the traffic continuously until user stops the recorder or specify the size limit to stop the traffic capture.
Hardware Filters
The Hardware Filter option allows user to easily set up filter conditions to filter out unwanted traffic at line rate, continuously capture only the traffic of interest, and modify filters on the fly.
Example: Filtering GTP Traffic
Up to 10 filters can be defined based on various parameters in the protocol layers. As an example, GTP is configured in the below figure.
Recorder Statistics
Recorder statistics displays the statistics information of
- Filter Match Frames
- Filter Not Match Frames, Total Frames
- Filter Match Frames %
- Dropped Frames (Due to Buffer Overflow)
- Recorded Bytes (Gbytes)
- Capture Rate (Mbps)
- Filtered Rate (Mbps)
- Capture Frame Rate (Frames/Sec)
- Filtered Frame Rate (Frames/Sec)
- Record Duration (hr:min)
- Available Host Buffer Size (Kbytes)
- Utilized Host Buffer Size (Kbytes)
- Available OnBoard Memory Size (Mbytes)
- Utilized OnBoard Memory Size (%)
- Utilized OnBoard Memory Size (Mbytes)
- Disk Write Fail Count
Recording Time Table
Packet Length |
512 |
Bytes |
|
Overhead |
20 |
Bytes |
12 bytes minimum IFG + 8 bytes Preamble+SFD |
Napatech Overhead |
16 |
Bytes |
Packet Header Overhead |
Actual Overhead |
-4 |
||
Link Speed |
10 |
Gbps |
|
Number of Links |
4 |
||
Disk Space/sec |
4.620233085 |
GB |
|
Duration (minutes) |
18 |
Minutes |
|
Total Disk Space |
4.872902082 |
TB |
|
PacketExtractor™ Application
PacketExtractor™ application consists of configuration settings that allows user to extract recorded files on the selected HD NIC interface port with or without applying filters and by specifying the different limit criteria (Time, Packet Count and Size) into required output file format to analyze the results using PacketScan and Wireshark application . User can also save the extracted traffic in multiple files by providing the file size to create a new file after every specified file size.
In the packet extraction from the stored recordings without filter the Extractor Filter option is unchecked and no filter configurations are done to extract the traffic.
In the packet extraction from the stored recordings with filter the Extractor Filter option is checked and required filter configurations are done to extract the traffic.
Analysis of Extracted Traffic
The extracted files can be analyzed using PacketScan™ HD and Wireshark application
Resources
Item No. | Item Description |
PKV123 |
FastRecorder™ and PacketExtractor™ |
Related Software | |
PKV120 |
PacketScan™ HD - High Density IP Traffic Analyzer w/ 4x1GigE |
PKV120p |
PacketScan HD™ w/4 x 1GigE - Portable |
PKV122 |
PacketScan™ HD - High Density IP Traffic Analyzer w/ 2x10GigE |
PKV122p |
PacketScan HD™ w/2 x 10 GigE - Portable |
PKV124 |
|
PKV124P |
|
PKV121 |
PacketScan™ FB - (Offline Analyzer) |
PKV100 |
PacketScan™ (Real-time and Offline) |
PKV101 |
|
PKV170 |
NetsurveyorWeb™ (Perpetual License, Unlimited Users/Nodes) |
PKV169 |
NetsurveyorWeb™ Lite |
Traffic Options | |
GTP Mobile Traffic Options | |
---|---|
ETH101 |
MobileTrafficCore - GTP |
RTP Traffic Options | |
PKS102 |
RTP Soft Core (additional) |
PKS103 |
RTP IuUP Softcore |
PKS200 |
RTP Pass Through Fax Emulation |
PKS211 |
T.38 Fax Simulation |
PKS107 |
RTP EUROCAE ED-137B |
PKS108 |
RTP Voice Quality Measurements |
PKS106 |
RTP Video Traffic Generation |
PCD103 |
Optional Codec – AMR – Narrowband (requires additional license) |
PCD104 |
Optional Codec - EVRC (requires additional license) |
PCD105 |
Optional Codec – EVRC-B (requires additional license) |
PCD106 |
Optional Codec – EVRC-C (requires additional license) |
PCD107 |
Optional Codec – AMR - Wideband (requires additional license) |
PCD108 |
Optional Codec - EVS (requires additional license) |
PCD109 |
Optional Codec - Opus (requires additional license) |