Although this release of Surveyor does not have the ability to forward SNMP traps when it spots a problem, it can send a page or an E-mail message. To obtain information about the health of the wire, administrators usually have to dedicate a hardware probe to each monitored segment, or lug the analyzer to the site and plug it in near the suspected trouble spot. Shomiti's Century 12-Tap, a wiring device that looks like a hub and allows a single Explorer to sample any one of 12 segments, offers a much better approach, thanks to the control button on Surveyor's console that allowed us to select specific segments to monitor. Surveyor also matches wits with Network General's Sniffer by enabling network managers to decode Oracle Corp., Sybase Inc. and Microsoft Corp. SQL database traffic. Unlike Network General, however, Shomiti includes these modules with Surveyor at no extra charge.
Most protocol analyzers rely on a central console that is only accessible from a single location.
We think it's great that Surveyor can be installed on multiple machines or even on a file server, as network managers on the prowl will be able to access the console from anywhere on the network. First off, Surveyor's graphical interface is far more accessible than Sniffer's text-based one. Surveyor made it simple to select among various media access control or network layer parameters, including NetBIOS packets, to indicate that we wanted to be notified after a threshold was exceeded or that the rate of change got out of hand. Alerts can be assigned to groups of monitored segments or to individual segments. Although not a unique capability among protocol monitors, Explorer's RMON2 implementation allowed us to monitor voluminous amounts of information.