HP TopTools for Hubs and Switches - Manual (Page 126)

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Planning for Network Growth
How the Network Performance Advisor Collects Data
Keeping the historical data about each conversation on a network requires a
large amount of disk space. HP has developed a patented technique for greatly
reducing the amount of data collected by using a statistical sampling of
network traffic. Statistical sampling is the appropriate method for detecting
the major contributors to traffic on the network because most network
problems are caused by a few nodes that generate the most packets, the most
errors, or use a large portion of the available bandwidth. Information about
interesting
traffic can easily be separated from the noise or traffic coming
from the majority of nodes that only send small amounts of data.
HP’s sampling method is based on randomly sampling network traffic and has
been mathematically proven to work under
all network conditions. The traffic
is correctly attributed to the nodes that are creating it. Because of this random
sampling method you don’t need to provide a sampling interval to the Network
Performance Advisor.
Traffic Data Collector Performance
You can specify the amount of system resources that the data collector can
use. A more detailed network analysis requires more availability of system
resources. The selections are:
■ High Resource Availability—Recommended for systems dedicated to
network management. The default setting.
■ Medium Resource Availability—Recommended for systems that run other
less performance-sensitive applications.
■ Low Resource Availability—Recommended for systems that run perfor-
mance-sensitive applications.
To access this page, select the Performance button in the HP TopTools naviga-
tion frame, then click on Traffic Data Collector Settings. Select the Performance
tab.