Given that Surveyor is likely to be used in unattended mode, e-mail notification is critical. Catch that packet Capturing data at wire speed is where the Explorer probe excelled. We tossed hundreds of megabits per second of traffic at the probe, and it never dropped a packet. With a 256M-byte buffer, there's plenty of room for captured data, even at extremely high bandwidth. Surveyor's filters are one of its strongest features.
Users can define capture and display filters that make sorting the signal from the noise easy.
This beats plugging in hexadecimal numbers manually. Using the plug-in, which is an optional module, we monitored H.323 and Q.931 traffic, examined maximum and minimum jitter statistics, and counted dropped packets. Surveyor has one of the best QoS decoding engines we've seen. Unfortunately, we found Surveyor and the Explorer probe to be highly unstable in this release. We identified several bugs in the filtering engine related to Windows 2000, and we experienced repeated, and unexplained, losses of connectivity with the Explorer probe and our NT-based probe.