Distinct Network Monitor Overview

Distinct Network Monitor 5.0

Why use Distinct Network Monitor? 

Distinct Network Monitor is an essential utility in every network administrator's and software developer's toolbox. Distinct Network monitor is both an advanced IP packet decoder, translating complex protocol negotiation into English as well as a network statistics gathering and reporting tool. So who should use it?

For Network Administrators

For the network administrator, Distinct Network Monitor version 5.0 offers advanced statistics gathering and reporting. Distinct Network Monitor supports the collection of statistical sampling of traffic taken at the mirror port of the switch or on a non-switched hub to Microsoft Access.

Live statistics show the live network traffic activity for any given network segment monitored. Live statistics can cover a configurable time frame from 15-120 minutes.

For more detailed HTML reporting, the Report Builder comes with several pre-defined statistical report templates as well as the ability to allow the creation of custom built reports. In addition to a number of different bandwidth usage reports, Report Builder is able to generate more detailed reports for HTTP traffic and FTP traffic on the network. Network bandwidth trending based on the statistical samples gathered is now also possible.

ReportBuilder can also be instrumental in helping to identify network security breaches and compliance with corporate security policies related to network usage.

• A Packet Sniffing Tool for Software Developers 

Distinct Network Monitor is the perfect packet analyzer for the networking software engineer providing detailed information at the packet level for the network traffic that is going over the network while pinpointing network protocol related problems. Distinct Network Monitor in fact captures network traffic and translates the protocol negotiation of that traffic into simple English. Settings can be customized to provide English details only for some protocols and just the packet summary for others. Now Distinct Network Monitor can also capture traffic on the loop-back address assisting developers in debugging their network applications on a single system. See Networking Tools for details on the additional networking tools bundled with Network Monitor and geared towards software developers.

What can Distinct Network Monitor do for you?
What is essentially different between a plain packet sniffing product and Distinct Network Monitor is that the Distinct Network Monitor interprets the packets in simple English. For any specific connection it is able to pinpoint any packet errors it sees by marking these with a black X. Some packets are marked with a white X; these do not necessarily denote an error but are a warning of packet retransmission and other non-fatal network errors.

Distinct Network Monitor comes with detailed parsers for the most common protocols. For other protocols Distinct can supply you with an API that can be used to add your own custom parser for any IP based protocol.