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“The power with Observer is that you can drill down and look at your Mean Opinion Score (MOS), your R-factor,” says Paggeot. “You can also see port-to-port conversations.”

The team used Observer to look at which ports computers were using in their conversations and replay the traffic. Using WAN analysis, they were able to determine how the VoIP system would respond based on different scenarios and flight paths.

“We used the same techniques for the application layer, to look at the DNS, the databases, and the VoIP system, and characterize what we saw,” explains Paggeot. “We instrumented the different assets with Observer so we could get the data and captures we needed.

Blazing New Trails
The Joint Expeditionary Force Experiment (JEFX) ’06 tested new concepts and processes aimed at bolstering offensive and defensive capabilities, including the use of airborne IP networking. The 46th Test Squadron was on hand to make sure the hundreds of participants and myriad weapons, vehicles, and other devices stayed connected.

“We had hundreds of systems—tons and tons of servers in a massive configuration,” says Paggeot. “In looking for network problems, if Observer shows me a 200 millisecond response time, I ask myself, ‘Is that because of the network or because of the application?’ I’m able to drill down quickly and sort it out.”

Based on this network testing, the crew compiled a users’ manual of sorts, including a detailed list of technical deficiencies. In some cases, the corrected problems improved response times drastically, from about one hour to about one minute.

In national defense situations, time is the enemy. Troops and command forces require real-time data to make sound decisions quickly, which means systems must be able to communicate with one another properly with acceptable response times.

“Systems provide updates to other systems, perhaps that a missile was fired,” says Paggeot. “With Observer, we would watch under ICMP messages to see whether a router could deliver a message.”

Observer: Air Force’s Top Gun
Operations like JEFX draw heavily on financial and time resources. As such, it is in the government’s interest for things to work correctly the first time. The 46th Test Squadron remembers the days when network problems were far more difficult—and costly—to sort out.

“Sometimes we’d lose the event, and we would have spent thousands of dollars, a hundred thousand dollars,” says Paggeot. “We wouldn’t know until the last day that it was a multicast broadcast storm. Now, if that happens at any of our events, we know in minutes.”

Several years ago, the Air Force held a command-and-control test with a different analyzer. Alongside them, the Navy had purchased Observer to perform application analysis, deep drill-down, and real-time captures, all of which caught the Air Force’s eye.

“We all looked at it and liked it. It is a powerful tool,” says Paggeot. “The application features, the ease of use, the help features—the 46th Test Squadron bought all of it. All of our flights have it.”

Sergeant Stacia Zachary from the 96th Air Base Wing says the test squadron makes heavy use of application analysis, port-to-port conversational mapping, and web trending, which they use to gauge current bandwidth usage and project the impact of increased loads on network health.

It seems that at Eglin Air Force Base, Observer’s popularity is growing.
“People now come to us and say, ‘Hey, can you check on my system now before I go and waste a hundred billion dollars?’” says Zachary. “The 46th is saving people lots of money and lots of wasted effort that they weren’t able to before. They are actually helping people succeed, faster.”

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