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. All systems had at least 192M bytes of RAM, the minimal amount required by Surveyor. We deployed the probes on the primary Internet feed of our 40,000-node enterprise network using a Shomiti Systems optical splitter. Back to top 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.