These in-depth live Webinars OnDemand Webcasts cover network analysis topics such as VoIP monitoring, network forensics and application performance monitoring.

"It’s Not a Matter of If, But When…" - Network Forensics, the Ultimate Security Tool

Another common theme in the breaches of the past few years is that there is no common theme – every breach is unique. Gone are the days when attacks are global and generic, when once identified an attack can be quickly isolated and neutralized. Breaches today are specifically targeted, often exploiting weaknesses not just in hardware or software systems, but in operational procedures, personal habits, and the abundance of information available on the Internet and via social networking.

The uniqueness of each attack renders traditional solutions, like IDS/IPS solutions, useless. Not only may such solutions miss the initial exploitation, but they have no means to help in identifying to what degree the network was comprised and what data is at risk. The only viable approach is to constantly capture all network traffic, and employ Network Forensics, to characterize not only the breach, but to also assess the damage, ensure no further compromise, and comply with corporate and legal requirements for reporting.

In this web seminar, we will cover:

• An overview of recent network breaches and their characteristics
• A comprehensive description of Network Forensics
• The unique challenges of Network Forensics on highly-utilized 10G networks
• Using Network Forensics to identify and manage network breaches

What you will learn:

1. Tips and techniques for capturing data for Network Forensic analysis
2. Using Network Forensics to identify and characterize breaches
3. Establishing guidelines for ongoing network data collection for Network Forensics

802.11n – Are You Seeing It All?

As the client side of 802.11n begins another round of upgrades, mainly through support of additional transmit and receive paths (3x3 clients, for example), new demands will be put both on these networks and the systems used to monitor and troubleshoot them. As more 3x3 wireless clients become available, network monitoring and analysis solutions relying on 2x2 wireless adapters for data collection may miss critical wireless traffic. What do you need to do to make sure you see it all?

In this web seminar, we will cover:

• An overview of key 802.11n performance enhancement technologies
• Current capabilities of typical 802.11n hardware
• A detailed review of the meaning of "mxn"

What you will learn:

1. Tips and techniques for network monitoring and analysis in 802.11n and mixed environments
2. How data transmission and reception differ for various "mxn" devices
3. How network monitoring and analysis requirements differ for mixed "mxn" environments

24/7 Distributed Network Monitoring for Real-Time and Post-Capture Analysis

In this webcast, Jay Botelho, Director of Product Management presents an overview of WildPackets’ OmniPeek Distributed Analysis Solution, with a specific focus on managing, maintaining, and troubleshooting a widely distributed network.

Topics include:

• Overview of distributed analysis topologies
• Determining and optimizing data collection points
• Managing distributed 10 Gig segments
• Comparison of real-time vs. post-capture analysis
• Managing distributed network management data
• Enabling analytical collaboration

Application vs. Network — The Fight is On! - Application and Network Performance Monitoring

Delivering optimized application performance across you network shouldn't be a struggle. Your end user’s experience — and potentially how your business is perceived — depends on your ability to analyze and troubleshoot your environment. You need to find the true culprit behind slowdowns — the application or the network.

Attend this web seminar led by Jim Thor to learn:

• How to determine what is at fault and how to use TCP to prove it
• How to eliminate false positives by tuning expert events

Jim will provide a brief overview of WildPackets OmniPeek. He’ll then present a process for getting the proof you need to show it’s not the network, and walk you through two real-world examples. At the end of this web seminar you’ll be able to state confidently "it’s not the network!"

Best Practices for Analyzing 10G Ethernet Traffic

Your 10 Gigabit Ethernet (10GbE) network segments give you all the bandwidth you need to accommodate your ever-increasing network load and mix of network services. But with the 10x increase in bandwidth over your legacy 1GbE segments comes an equivalent increase in complexity in monitoring, managing and troubleshooting. What can you do to address this increased management complexity? Which techniques that worked well with 1GbE network segments should you avoid? What best practices should be applied?

Do you have the real-time visibility AND the historical network traffic you need to continue to take advantage of your investment in 10GbE? In this webcast we address these questions, and some of the finer points below.

• Match network analysis requirements with the appropriate network analysis techniques
• Ensure you're collecting and analyzing the data you expect
• Learn to work within the hardware limitations of network analysis probes
• Optimize data collection settings to meet the demands of your network and your analysis solution
• Use advanced settings like hardware filtering and time stamping to your advantage
• Determine the proper placement of network analysis probes to ensure network management and troubleshooting success

Best Practices in Enterprise-wide Network Performance Management

Watch this webcast as we host Jim Frey, Research Director at Enterprise Management Associates, for an in depth discussion of strategies and best practices for enterprise-wide network and application performance monitoring. Jim discusses the business value of network monitoring technologies as well as key strategies for proactive management with special emphasis on the impact that VoIP and Video are having in today’s converged networks. Jay Botelho, our director of Product Management then gives an update on the latest solutions from WildPackets that offer the enterprise-wide visibility that companies need to effectively manage their networks.

Beyond NetFlow... The Need for Centralized Network Monitoring

In this webcast, you will learn:

• All flow data is not created equal
• Traditional flow-based network analysis solutions lack depth for true troubleshooting
• Analyzing headers AND payloads provides unrivaled network visibility
• WildPackets OmniFlow data and WatchPoint network monitoring solution provide a single solution for both network monitoring AND troubleshooting

Cloud Computing - the Demise of Network Analysis?

Cloud computing was one of the hottest topics in 2009, and all indications are that it will remain a very hot topic for 2010, and perhaps beyond. Cloud computing is a disruptive technology, and as such it has the potential to change the landscape for many traditional IT functions, perhaps initiating the demise of many. Is traditional network analysis one of these?

This web seminar examines the issues impacting traditional network analysis in the Cloud Computing era, and concludes that far from its demise, Cloud Computing is likely to increase the need for, and the demands on, network analysis. Specifically, this web seminar will validate this conclusion by addressing the following topics:

• Cloud Computing options
• Current trends in Cloud Computing
• You can't outsource oversight
• Managing infrastructure vs. managing service availability and application performance
• Renewed importance of network analysis metrics - my network or your cloud?

What you will learn:

• Applying network analysis in various Cloud Computing scenarios
• Which traditional network analysis metrics are pertinent in Cloud Computing
• Network analysis in blended environments

Cyber Security: Don't get victimized, arm yourself

This definition is in many ways far more revealing than the words that comprise it. It's brevity speaks volumes to the breadth and scope of this issue. It is broad. It is far-reaching. It is therefore hard to know where to look if you can't look everywhere at once.

Typical approaches to cyber security involve collecting diverse data, with different formats, from a multitude of sources such as firewall logs, router logs, Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS), server logs, hard drives and system dumps. The resulting hodge-podge of data is not easily recompiled into a coherent picture, often forcing analysts to guess about the breach. That's why we continue to see headlines about security attacks at brand-name websites like Facebook and Twitter.

In this webcast we will cover key characteristics of cyber security as well key elements of a cyber security solution. We then explore one solution that addresses the issues of diverse data, formats, and sources.

Specific topics include:

• Recent trends in cyber security
• Key questions that must be addressed
• Network forensics and data recording
• Establishing an attack fingerprint
• Preventing future occurrences

It's not a question of if, only when. Arm yourself with the knowledge you need before becoming the next "victim."

Finding and Fixing VoIP Call Quality Issues

Traditional telephone services have typically gained a reputation of providing excellent voice quality and superior reliability. Consequently, users expect their phone systems will provide high quality with virtually no downtime. Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) is changing the rules on how we monitor, analyze, and troubleshoot our networks. Unless all of your VoIP users are sitting in your data center, the only way to truly understand call quality and network performance requires you to have visibility into all your VoIP traffic-at both ends of the conversation!

In this webcast, you'll learn:

• What Six Factors Contribute to Poor Voice Quality
• How to Establish Metrics for Evaluating VoIP Call Quality
• How to Troubleshoot and Fix Poor Voice Quality with WildPackets OmniPeek

Forensic Analysis for Network Security

Forensic analysis for network security involves capturing network data for analysis minutes, hours, or even days after a network event has occurred. How can forensic analysis help organizations tighten their network security and improve their compliance with internal security policies and industry regulations? Learn from the customer case studies presented in this informative webcast.

Improving the IP Telephony Experience: How to Troubleshoot Converged Networks

IT and Telecom departments are realizing that the performance of the underlying infrastructure is paramount to successful VoIP implementation with Unified Communications (UC). To get the real benefits of UC, your network needs to perform at optimal levels.

In this webcast, you'll receive a framework that allows you to answer the following questions:

• How Do You Deal with the Challenges of Jitter, Packet Loss, Echo/Delay, and Voice Signal to Noise?
• How Do You Balance High-speed, Bursty Data Requirements with Requirements of High Quality Voice Calls?
• How Do You Create Help Desk Guidelines to Correctly Direct Problems to a Voice or LAN/WAN Subject Matter Expert?
• How Do You Make Sure that When Adding UC to the Mix that Your Users are Receiving the QoS that They Deserve?

Monitoring and Analyzing Networks for Telepresence

Though telepresence can’t transport molecules, it is transporting a great deal of data, mixing together already complex data types, like voice and video, with your already busy data network. And as with most new technologies, the need to analyze and troubleshoot failures is always greater for the early adopters. Are you prepared to monitor, analyze, and troubleshoot your telepresence deployment? Can you rely on the utilities provided by your vendor, or is independent analysis and verification required? And how about mixed mode deployments? To prepare you for a successful video conferencing deployment, this web seminar will address the following topics:

• Current trends in telepresence
• Anatomy of a telepresence system
• Telepresence: a complicated marriage of VoIP and Video over IP
• Typical voice and video technologies used in telepresence
• Monitoring and analyzing telepresence performance on your network

What you will learn:

1. Establish requirements for monitoring and analyzing telepresence deployments
2. Determine which metrics to use for monitoring and analyzing telepresence deployments
3. Size network analysis solutions for telepresence deployments
4. Adapt existing network analysis solutions for telepresence deployments

Live long and prosper.

OmniPeek Distributed Analysis Suite Overview

The OmniPeek Distributed Analysis Suite includes the award-winning OmniPeek network analyzer, OmniEngine software probe, and Omnipliance Network Recorders, advanced analysis cards, and a host of extensions that add virtually unlimited functionality across all areas of wireless, Gigabit, 10 Gigabit, and wide area networks.

In this seminar, Jay Botelho, Director of Product Management, demonstrates how network engineers can confidently face the challenges of analyzing and troubleshooting today's converged networks. Attend this seminar and learn how to:

• Use intuitive VoIP and Video Dashboards to see the voice and/or video quality for each stream being transmitted
• View statistics such as MOS and RFactor over time for a truer representation of user experience
• Compare real-time demand using Media Throughput vs. Network Throughput graphs
• In cases of poor performance or system issues/outages, quickly drill down and analyze the exact cause of the issue, including unexpected interactions between voice/video and data

The Blind Spot in Virtual Networks: Seeing with Network Analysis

The move towards virtual servers is no longer just a trend. As IT budgets and staff shrink, virtualization has become a way of life in the data center, reducing the cost of equipment, management and even utilities. However, it's not just servers, but the entire network infrastructure that is being virtualized, creating realities in network analysis that must be addressed. Network virtualization creates a blind spot - a loss of visibility into traffic between virtual applications when using traditional network analysis products and techniques. In this webcast, we dissect this problem and demonstrate ways to overcome these network blind spots.

Specific topics include:

• Describing the cause of virtual network blind spots
• Network analysis from a VMware workstation
• Network analysis with VMware ESX

You will also learn how to:

1. Establish goals for virtual network analysis
2. Define hardware requirements to meet analysis goals
3. Configure your virtual network for the realities of network analysis

The Need for Speed – Analyzing and Troubleshooting 10Gig Networks

Your 10 Gigabit Ethernet (10G) network segments give you all the bandwidth you need to accommodate your ever-increasing network load and mix of network services. But with the 10x increase in traffic over your legacy 1G segments comes an equivalent increase in complexity in monitoring, managing and troubleshooting. What can you do to address this increased management complexity? Which techniques that worked well with 1G network segments should you avoid? What best practices should be applied?

Achieving both real-time visibility and storing historical network traffic for post-incident analysis is possible in 10G environments – you just have much more data to manage. Careful attention to detail when configuring network management systems will reward you with the analysis and troubleshooting results you desire.

In this web seminar, we will cover:

• Common pitfalls in 10Gig network analysis
• The differences for network analysis in 1Gig and 10Gig environments
• Matching network analysis requirements with the appropriate network analysis techniques

What you will learn:

1. Work within the hardware limitations of network analysis probes
2. Optimize data collection settings to meet the demands of your network and your analysis solution
3. Use advanced settings like hardware filtering and time stamping to your advantage
4. Determine the proper placement of network analysis probes to ensure network management and troubleshooting success

The Need for Speed – No More Compromises!

But no longer. Now the era of compromise in 10G analysis and troubleshooting is over! Introducing the TimeLine network recorder from WildPackets.

TimeLine is the networking industry’s first network analysis, monitoring, and troubleshooting appliance truly capable of meeting the demands of 10G analysis and troubleshooting — without compromise. Capture and store all the traffic on your 10G network segment without slicing and dicing the data. View real-time network performance, including VoIP statistics, while capturing all packets to disk for further post-capture analysis. Use the highest-performing network forensics solution available with the most advanced Expert network analysis options to quickly spot "the needle in the haystack", identifying problem areas and determining the root cause of network issues in record time.

This web seminar provides a detailed look into the new TimeLine appliance from WildPackets, the fastest and most capable network analysis and troubleshooting appliance on the market. In the web seminar, we will cover:

• Current compromises in 10G analysis and troubleshooting
• An overview of the TimeLine appliance
• Use of the TimeLine appliance for network forensics
• A real-time demo of the capabilities of TimeLine

What you will learn:

• Best practices for analysis and troubleshooting of 10G networks, without compromise
• How to configure TimeLine for optimum network analysis and troubleshooting

Voice over Wi-Fi (VoFi) - Can You Manage It?

New problems come hand in hand with a new technology, so you’ll need to be prepared to monitor, manage, and troubleshoot your VoFi traffic. WildPackets’ OmniPeek products combine our award winning wireless network analysis capabilities with our industry-leading VoIP analysis to deliver the most accurate and complete VoFi analysis product available today.

In this webcast, Jay Botelho, Director of Product Management focuses on the VoFi capabilities of OmniPeek and its ability to handle the complex analysis required to address VoFi.

Specific topics include:

• Overview of general 802.11n capabilities including multichannel aggregation
• Capturing data for VoFi analysis
• Monitoring the overall VoFi deployment
• Using VoIP metrics to identify problems
• Analyzing a VoFi call packet by packet
• Using call playback to verify voice quality
• Wireless roaming analysis and its effect on VoFi quality

WatchPoint 1.1 Overview: Distributed 24x7 Enterprise-Wide Network Monitoring and Data Collection

In this webinar we will cover the overall features and capabilities of WatchPoint and the problems it can help you address. We will specifically focus on the newest features in our recent release, including:

• Baseline creation
• Establishing monitoring conditions for specific troubleshooting, alerts and notifications
• PDF reports for base-lining and management summaries
• Expert event aggregation from distributed OmniEngine software probes
• New user interfaces for
  • Configuration settings
  • Users management
  • Collector and interface management
  • PDF report management

WatchPoint is the perfect network monitoring solution for anyone with more than one OmniEngine in their network infrastructure; anyone who needs to aggregate OmniEngine, NetFlow and sFlow data; or anyone looking to expand their OmniEngine footprint. We look forward to your participation!

Wi-Fi Analysis

Whether by design or by default, every company has a wireless network. Unless you understand, control and manage this network, you are creating serious vulnerabilities that threaten network security. As more and more companies begin using wireless as a primary medium for data services, including VoIP and video, a network analysis solution that can provide Expert analysis for both wired and wireless segments, simultaneously, is the only viable solution. With OmniPeek, WildPackets continues to address this need head-on. WildPackets has a complete offering to address wireless network analysis, from the wireless network edge all the way to the data center. OmniPeek addresses the need for portable, simultaneous analysis of wired and wireless network segments, including full support for analysis of 802.11n Draft 2.0 wireless equipment; for remote wireless sensing using the existing AP infrastructure; and for remote analysis of both wired and wireless segments, using WildPackets OmniEngine products. Learn about the challenges and successes of other organizations faced with troubleshooting Wi-Fi networks.

Wireless Campus Networks

This web seminar examines the issues associated with monitoring, analyzing and troubleshooting campus-wide and multi-campus wireless deployments. Long gone are the days when walking around with a portable wireless network analyzer is a feasible approach to addressing wireless issues. You need active, immediate alerts before the trouble starts and the help desk gets flooded. You need to be able to reach out into the network at a moment’s notice, anywhere in the world, to collect data and analyze possible problem areas. Specifically, this web seminar will address the following aspects of wireless campus networks:

• Wireless campus growth and 802.11n
• More users, more problems
• New technologies require new network analysis techniques
• Preparing for expanded wireless services

What you will learn:

1. How to manage distributed wireless LANs
2. How to leverage existing assets for WLAN analysis
3. The importance of analyzing both wired and wireless segments simultaneously

Wireless LAN Operations: 5 Key Challenges that Stifle Productivity

In the evolution of wireless technology and its uses for everyday business operations, wireless infrastructure has evolved organically with little planning. This webcast covers five often overlooked issues with wireless LANs that can affect your business. Craig Mathias helps you determine whether your WLAN is a still a silo or a robust platform for mission-critical applications. He also covers:

• Mixed networks where 802.11n coexists with a/b/g
• Distributed/remote WLAN analysis
• Wireless as the base platform for other technologies such as VoIP
• "Wireless" problems that arise from other pieces of your IT infrastructure
• Security policies that transcend the wireless network and affect your entire organization

You'll finish the webcast with a checklist for evaluating and correcting the risk factors in your environment.