 |
GigaStor™ Portable Released
The new GigaStor Portable incorporates the retrospective network analysis capabilities of GigaStor into a luggable, all-in-one appliance weighing less than 23 lbs. GigaStor Portable has been well received with customers, media, and analysts. SearchNetworking.com discussed NEC’s use of GigaStor Portable:
“Service provider NEC has been using four GigaStor Portable units for customer site surveys and capacity planning. The ability to go back in time lets NEC engineers determine network peak times for a client and return to the time when a problem occurred. |
|
"If the problem happened on a Monday and this is Wednesday, we can go back," said Ivan McDuffie, NEC’s manager of engineering. "It's flexible for network assessments," he said, "and cuts down on our time at the customer site and the time spent finding and solving the problems."
Learn more about GigaStor Portable >>
In Practice: Internal Compliance with GigaStor
Summary
In addition to troubleshooting network, application, and security issues, GigaStor helps enforce internal acceptable network use policies. GigaStor captures and saves network-level data, which can be reconstructed for documenting any prohibited network use. |
At a large financial organization, an employee was being reviewed for possible termination by human resources. Among the offenses, the employee was accused of browsing prohibited web sites.
The network team was tasked with researching possible offenses. HR needed conclusive proof of the infraction; providing only domain names and web addresses was not acceptable. |
 |
The network team needed to document the incidents in a way that would reflect the activity the employee perpetrated and eliminate the chance of a wrongful termination lawsuit. Gathering evidence on the user with GigaStor was an easy three-step process:
- Isolate the timeframe
The administrator used GigaStor to isolate the employee’s most recent web activity by selecting the timeframe when the web visits occurred.
- Drill down on user data
Next the engineer selected the specific user, whose traffic patterns were graphed to display periods of excessive activity from the system in question. The filtered data revealed all the web sites visited by the employee.
- Get proof
By right-clicking on the Internet address, GigaStor reconstructed the captured packets into the original web pages proving the employee visited several prohibited web sites.
Learn more about forensics >>
Tech Tip: Monitoring by Subnet
With the release of Observer® 12, it is now possible within GigaStor to configure and collect statistical information for a group of computers based upon an entire subnet or a range of IPs. For example, if you had all web servers within the IP range 192.168.1.1 – 192.168.1.10, you could set up statistics to be monitored in aggregate for this IP range. You could then set up multiple groups for side-by-side comparisons. It’s easy to set up this monitoring option through the following:
- From the GigaStor Control window, select Settings within the main menu.
- This will bring up the GigaStor Settings menu, where you should click Subnet tab.
- Within the Subnet tab, press the Add button to add either a range of IP addresses or a subnet with appropriate IP address.
|
 |
June 2007 
