Patent ID: 7986632

Claim:
A proactive network analysis system providing an integrated compilation of network tools for diagnosing network problems, measuring network performance, and monitoring network status, the system comprising: a distributed network packet capture data stream collector providing selective recordings of network traffic; a traffic analyzer providing selected samples of specified end-to-end paths, wherein the sampling is at one of the network layer, the IP layer, OS layer, or application layer; a syslog recorder analyzer and archiving unit to collect and summarize log events from the network; and a remote access server identification tool to identify Remote Access Servers on the network, wherein the tool uses the following process: a. Check each known Layer 3 switch, b. On the router, get an ARP cache, c. Find any MAC address that has multiple IP addresses associated with it, d. Ignore known MAC addresses or vendor IDs, e. Ping the IP addresses, and check the time-to-live value, known as TTL, on the resultant response, wherein a primary server will have an TTL that is greater than remotely attached devices and based on the differing values of the TTL field, a RAS server is identified.