Patent ID: 8689107

Claim:
A method for monitoring the operation of a telecommunications network, comprising: displaying, on a user interface of a network monitoring system, a multi-protocol flow representing packets captured from the telecommunications network during a selected time period; highlighting the multi-protocol flow on the user interface display if any session records within the multi-protocol flow do not meet operator-defined criteria; detecting a user's selection of the multi-protocol flow; displaying, on the user interface, a plurality of protocol-specific flows that are within the multi-protocol flow; highlighting one or more of the protocol-specific flows on the user interface display if any session records within the protocol-specific flows do not meet operator-defined criteria; detecting the user's selection of one of the protocol-specific flows; displaying, on the user interface, a plurality of session flows that are within the selected protocol-specific flow; highlighting any session records on the user interface display that do not meet operator-defined criteria; detecting the operator's selection of one of session flows; displaying, on the user interface, a plurality of packets that are within the selected session flow; wherein the method aggregates session flows in a hierarchical manner to identify errors in a lower layer of the hierarchy.