Message Board

Windows LOG on

vivicente — Thur, 09 Oct 2008 10:46:52 GMT

Good morning, I encounter some slowness on window log on on a server.
Sometimes, the log on takes 2 minutes and in an other time 15 minutes. It is very long ...
How can I observe the traffic and resolve my problem? Which services have I to supervise ? DNS , Active directory ?

Any Ideas ?

Forum: Observer

I'm unable to connect the Probe with Observer

vivicente — Thur, 09 Oct 2008 07:49:42 GMT

Good morning every body. I'm unable to connect the probe tothe Observer software. When I 'm in Actions > Redirect Probe from the Observer Menu, i create a new probe with the folowing parameters :
Probe Name : Probe 1
Probe Ip address: 192.168.1.10
Next, I select this probe and I click on "redirect Selected Probe Entry", and at this time i Have the following error message :" Could not connect to the selected Probe. The Probe may be turned off ..."

I ping the Probe, it answers ...I also open the port 25901 et 25903 on the windows firewall..

Some Ideas ?? Please help me !!

Best regardsfrom France

Forum: Observer

Observer Suite Reporting Anomoly?

pete515 — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 07:30:07 GMT

I have configured Observer Suite to produce an hourly report for our network - 24 hours a day. The report is timed to be produced at 1 minute past the hour so that I get a complete hours worth of statistics. Everything seems fine EXCEPT at midnight when no data is produced.

Example - taken from actual reports:

22:01 Report:
23:01 Report: Period: 27 September 2008 00:00:00 to 28 September 2008 00:00:00
Time report period 00:00 - 23:00 (i.e 23 sets of statistics)
00:01 Report: Period: 28 September 2008 00:00:00 to 29 September 2008 00:00:00
No statistics.

Obviously this is something to do with the date change but is there anyway of configuring Observer Suite to produce the missing period between 23:00 and 00:00? Should I simply set the report generation to be 59 minutes past the hour?

Forum: Observer

Reserved Memory

mikedelafield — Thur, 25 Sep 2008 07:53:41 GMT

I have Observer 10.0 on Windows Server 2003 and when I try to reserve memory for Observer and reboot; the memory allocated is still set to 0Mb even though the overall amount has been reduced!??!

This works fine when observer is installed on my local PC. (Windows XP)

Any ideas? Is this a bug?

Forum: Observer

Netcams Traffic Missing

rah — Sun, 14 Sep 2008 15:07:20 GMT

We have 3 Sony PTZ IP Netcams on our LAN. We record from all three of them 24/7 to a single PC. The odd thing is that I don't see any traffic associated with them.

Our LAN is setup with a single main switch (HP Procurve 2824) to which 7 other switches (HP Procurve 2500 series) are connected. All PCs and network devices are hooked up to the 7 switches.

The NI Observer PC is connected to the main switch. I have a single probe which is connected to one of the 7 second tier switches. The netcams are connected to the second tier switches as well. However, none of the netcams are connected to a switch that either the local observer or probe are connected to.

The 3 Sony netcams have been discovered by "Discover Network Names" on both the local Observer as well as the probe. However, when I look in top talkers, none of the cameras show up at all. The PC recording all of their output shows up but its traffic is on a par with a typical PC workstation.

Since I know they are generating significant traffic, why don't I see it?

Thanks.

Forum: Observer

Observer Voip concurent calls

barlow — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 06:40:37 GMT

Hi Guys ,does anyone one know how many concurrent calls Observer 12 can handle?

Forum: Observer

one question for the version 10.1

perkin — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 03:15:33 GMT

Hello everyone

I have reveive a set of Observer 10.1 from my boss today and installed in my notebook, I found that it asked for a dongle, but my boss replied that no dongle required. I just want to make sure any dongle required and any picture of this dongle? It is because I cannot found that the dongle mentioned in the user menu.

Forum: Observer

Filtering for specific time periods

Luis — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 22:35:54 GMT

Hi,
I have a scheduled capture from 7:30AM to 10AM setup such that we try to catch an intermittent problem (on our network) that we're experiencing.

Between 7:30AM and 10AM, we end up capturing a couple of gigs worth of traffic between some 100 workstations & ~20 servers.

I have figured out how to filter for analyzing just one workstation or server, but what I really need to do is to filter all the data and analyze it for just some particular time period with the expert analyzer.

So for instance, if we know our network problem occured between 8:02AM and 8:17AM. I'd like to filter out all the other captured data outside those time frames and then what's left (those 15 minutes) I want to be able to analyze that with the "Expert Analysis" feature. This would help me narrow down the problem from 100 workstations & 20 servers down to a more manageable number if I knew what was talking during that time only or under specific protocols we're trying to troubleshoot.

This seems to me like a trivial expectation of the protocol analyzer to be able to do (filter data based on a specific start & end time frame), yet after 30 minutes of poking around, I can't seem to figure out how to do it.

Any help would be much appreciated.
Thanks in advance,
Luis

Forum: Observer

Managing Probe Appliance for 10/100/1000

gtalbot — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 14:02:46 GMT

Hi,

I just received 2 Probe Appliance 10/100/1000. Since these are running WINDOWS my question is how shoud I manage these boxes at the basic security level.

For the moment I am concern with the Microsoft security updates and virus protection. Our security policy require all WINDOWS systems on our network to receive security updates from our WSUS servers and the corporate antivirus software installed. At this point NAC in not implemented but it is comming.

Also the question of integrating these boxes int our corporate ADS will comme down.

I would like to consider these boxex as appliances, but they are WINDOWS and have to handle as such.

Any comments or recommendations?

Guy Talbot.

Forum: Hardware Forum

Expert - Server Analysis

pete515 — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 08:24:21 GMT

There appears to be a limit of 99 on the "Simultaneous Requests" rows in the Server Analysis statistic. What happens if there are (for example) 150 simultaneous application requests? Are they recorded as 99 or ignored? Sorry to bug people about these statistics (but I get asked about them by my managers) but can the method of calculating the statistic be explained too. How often does Observer calculate the number of "Simultaneous Requests"? Does it time slice into one second periods and calculate accordingly?

Thanks.

Forum: Observer

Truncate values in form labels

kabbott — Thur, 31 Jul 2008 16:33:06 GMT

Good Morning,

I'm Running Observer Suite 12.1.

Does anyone know if there is a way to truncate the label values shown in Form Bitmaps?

For instance, I have a form that displays a bitmap of server disk drives. If the drive is <70% full the bitmap is all green, 80% is half yellow, 90% is mostly yellow. The formula I use is dskused*100/dsksize.

I have the 'dislpay value as label' checked and I have the MIB index for the drive appended to the value.
The values I get are similar to 37.794-3

The total label is too long to be readable on the bitmap. What I would really like to see is 38-3, or even 37-3(truncated instead of rounded).

It didnt look like there were any operators available in the formula for truncating the results, and I didn't see any type of control at all within the enumerated bitmap control properties that allows for formatting of the number or even changing the font size. Does anyone have a way to do this?

Also, has any timeline been for implementing scripted formulae?

Thx
ka

Forum: Observer

Version Info and Revision History

rah — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 16:51:54 GMT

I've been using Observer for a number of years and like the product. There are several things I'd like to suggest as improvements to your software distribution to customers under maintenance.

Make receiving quarterly releases by CD voluntary. I'd prefer to be notified of new versions by e-mail and download if I want to upgrade. That would save you production costs.
Start incorporating the version/build number into the install file name. "ObserverSetup.exe" is not that helpful. I'd prefer something like "Observer12-1-0037.exe"
Start providing a revision history, both with the install file as well as maintaining it as a sticky subject on the forum. I'd like to know all of what I'm getting with a particular upgrade, not just the high points.
Post the latest version number on the website. Right now the only way to find this out is to either call tech support or simply download the latest from the website. So far I haven't figured out how to know what version the new version is otherwise.

Thanks.

Forum: Observer

Web browser report

dom — Sun, 13 Jul 2008 22:30:15 GMT

Hi,

I tried to generate web browser report by following these steps :
Trend/Analysis -> Start web browser report.
On the main page of the web browser report i clicked on scheduled reports and then the following message appears :
' there are no scheduled reports available'
what did i miss ?

Regards

Forum: Observer

Creating non-mib traps

kabbott — Thur, 10 Jul 2008 20:07:31 GMT

Good Morning,

I am running Observer Suite V12.

Observer has the ability to create new traps in the MIRs by right-clicking and selecting new, but the only documentation I can find just refers to dragging and dropping an existing trap from a MIC.

Our applications group has just started using Network Computing's TrapGen com object to allow their applications to send traps on failure conditions. Obviously there are no MIBs associated with this that can be walked and compiled so the traps can be D&Ded.

I am looking for a better understanding of how to manually create the traps in the MIRs.

Thus far I can successfully build a trap associated with a specific OID (ie 1.3.6.1.4.1.7000) of a specific type (say 7), receive that trap and set triggers based on it.

The part I cant figure out is how to use, and what to do with, the 'Variables' field in the trap properties.

Through the trapgen com object we can specify variables and values to bind (ie For example:
-v 1.3.6.1.4.1.1824.1.0.0.1 STRING "Very High Temperature")

but I cant figure out to access or see the information passed in the bound var on the observer side.

Has anyone figured this out?

Also, why can I double-click some received traps and see more information, and others I cant? The differentiation seems to be whether the exclamation on the trap icon is on the right or left. Is this just an indicator as whether there is more information to view?

thx,
ka

Forum: Observer

TCP Response Time

pete515 — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 14:22:10 GMT

I have read the definition for the "TCP Response Time" statistic in the Observer Expert Help Screen. Unfortunately I haven't really understood it and/or it doesn't correspond to what I can see in the decode.

The definition states "Displays in milliseconds the average response time for the packets in the conversation........". What is meant by "response time". Is it....

1. The time elapse between TCP data being sent to be ACKed by the connection partner?
2. The time elapse between TCP data being sent by the connection initiator (client) and TCP data being sent by the connection partner?
3. Something else?

Are the various times for Expert Observer documented in more detail elsewhere?

Thanks.

Pete Young.

Forum: Observer