Finally! It's easy to capture long term.

"Long term packet capture" and "ease of use" are concepts that rarely go in the same sentence.

Usually, long term packet capture means one of two things. 1) Buy a glitzy, massively expensive, petabyte capture solution that streams a zillion bits per second to disk. 2) Use Wireshark or tshark to do a rolling capture buffer that captures a bunch of files with a dizzying amount of detail.

And then - there was IOTA.

Plug in, power up, press capture. Done.

With the IOTA, long term capture is finally easy - not just to capture, but to analyze as well. Within a few minutes of capturing packets on my home network, I was able to detect and troubleshoot a DNS problem that my wife has been experiencing with Amazon Prime Video for months! (My roku was doing a round robin on DNS and using an internal DNS address that it was not advertising).

Another problem with long term capture is the analysis part.

Oftentimes a long term capture means that we need to comb through a mountain of data, hoping to using the right combo of filters to find the root cause. The analysis part is another area where IOTA helps to make things easy.

The dashboards make packets readable. Protocols, utilization, and conversations are easy to select, sort, filter, and analyze. We can even pull the packets back to Wireshark with a click of a button.

I am really looking forward to using this tool in my analysis work and posting what I learn. For now, the first lesson I would like to share is how simple long-term capture can be. It doesn't have to come from a crazy-expensive platform, nor do we need to do use lossy hardware (laptops and span ports) to bring in the packet truth. This method of analysis is plug and play, getting you the detail you need to fix problems quickly.

Want to know more about Iota 1G and 10G - https://www.profitap.com/iota-1g/