Default Parameters for TcpTrafficTest

This test monitors the TCP protocol traffic to and from a server. Since most popular applications (Web servers, Citrix, Databases, Application servers, etc.) rely on the TCP protocol for their proper functioning, traffic monitoring at the TCP protocol layer can provide good indicators of the performance seen by the applications that use TCP. The most critical metric at the TCP protocol layer is the percentage of retransmissions. Since TCP uses an exponential back-off algorithm for its retransmissions, any retransmission of packets over the network (due to network congestion, noise, data link errors, etc.) can have a significant impact on the throughput seen by applications that use TCP.

This page depicts the default parameters that need to be configured for the TcpTrafficTest.

• The TEST PERIOD list box helps the user to decide how often this test needs to be executed.

• Specify the minimum threshold for the number of segments sent/transmitted over the network in the segments_sent_min textbox. The default value is 10; in this case, the test will compute/report the TCP retransmit ratio measure only if more than 10 segments are sent over the network. On the other hand, if less than 10 segments are sent, then the test will not compute/report the TCP retransmit ratio measure. This is done to ensure that no false alerts are generated by the eG Enterprise system for the TCP retransmit ratio measure. You can change this minimum threshold to any value of your choice.

• Once the necessary values have been provided, clicking on the UPDATE button will register the changes made.

When changing default configurations of tests, the values with “$” indicate variables that will be replaced by the eG system according to the specific server being managed - for instance, $hostName is the host/nickname of the target host, $port is the port number of the server being monitored. E.g., for a server xyz:80, $hostName will be changed automatically by the eG manager to “xyz*” and $port will be changed to “80” when configuring a test.