This data is stored, providing a historical record of application performance measures. The ability to define traceroute intervals brings the bandwidth use issue to the surface, allowing improved accountability for infrastructure utilization. Using defined intervals provides quantifiable network performance information. This technique separates the network from the application, providing measurements regarding the network's ability to transport specific applications and transactions. This allows for faster diagnostic ability of network versus application issues.
Passive agents focus on specific application measurements between defined ports or groups of ports.
It is critical for the administrator to be aware of which user is using which applications to provide optimal measurement information and agent deployment. For example, one set of users might use a human resources application while another group of users might use SAP predominately. Passive agent measurements are based on observations of traffic generated by an individual user. For optimal measurement information, a percentage of each group of users would have passive agents installed. This eliminates the probability of not obtaining any data should a single user be out of the office for a period of time.