Patent ID: 7826376

Claim:
A method for monitoring network performance in a computing system, said method comprising: loading a user application in user space on a source system, the user application being configured to communicate with a destination system; loading a non-external agent in the user space, in response to detecting loading of the user application, the non-external agent being configured to monitor network performance; detecting a received communication packet along a communication path prior to the packet being conveyed via a network, said detecting being performed by the non-external agent along the communication path, and wherein said packet corresponds to non-diagnostic production traffic generated by the user application; generating a modified packet by adding first time stamp information to the communication packet; storing, separate from the received communication packet, an identifier and the first time stamp information corresponding to the received communication packet; conveying, by the agent, the modified packet along the communication path via the network to the destination system; receiving an acknowledgement packet corresponding to the modified packet, wherein the acknowledgement packet includes second time stamp information, the second time stamp information indicating a time the modified packet was received by the destination system; retrieving the stored first time stamp information; and determining transit latency information corresponding to the communication packet, the transit latency information indicating a transit time of the modified packet from the source system to the destination system.