TrafficMan was its only major RMON2 module within Optivity Analysis, aside from its NetReporter package, which included some RMON2 reports. Although both of these applications were pretty slick, they exhibited very little interoperability with the other probes. What's more, the Bay probe the applications worked with had the fewest protocols of all the probes we evaluated. Although we liked the Bay applications, because of these shortcomings Bay suffered in our ratings. Like 3Com's Traffix, TrafficMan's conversational line representations are color-coded by protocol.
Networks appear as clouds that can be expanded to show the end nodes.
One major difference between the 3Com and Bay products is that TrafficMan polls the probes directly and immediately starts loading the data, as opposed to the archiving approach that Traffix uses. This is especially helpful for conversations whose black lines indicate an unidentifiable protocol. The decode immediately reveals the TCP port numbers in use. These protocols then can be added to the protocol directory using Bay's protocol extender application. Another beneficial feature of this application is its ability to store numerous historical samples f or the duration of a session.