Distributed packet capture and aggregation

Patent Number: 7,203,173

Date: April 10, 2007

Inventors: Bonney; Jordan C. (Bloomington, MN), Burnett; Benjamin L. (Prior Lake, MN), Charan; Deborah K. (Minneapolis, MN)

Abstract: A system is described for monitoring and testing enterprise networks that tend to have a number of geographically dispersed devices and interconnected sub-networks. The system includes a plurality of distributed agents to capture packets from a network. The system further includes an aggregation module coupled to the network to receive and aggregate the captured packets. During the aggregation process, the aggregation module identifies duplicate packets that were captured by different agents as an originating packet traverses the network. A display is coupled to the aggregation module, presents the non-duplicate network packets, giving a user a clear illustration of network activity. For the duplicate packets, the aggregation module presents a representative packet, such as the originating packet, that may be expanded by the user to view the details of the duplicate packets.