Microsoft finally released a new solutions pack to Operations Management suite the other day, which I have been waiting for since Ignite! WireData!!!
This is an solution pack that gathers meta data about your network, it requires a local agent installed on your servers as with other solution packs but allows you to get more detailed information about network traffic happening inside your infrastructure.
So if you have OMS you just need to go into the solution pack and add the wire data pack
But note that after adding the solution pack It need a while to gather the necessery data to create a sort of baseline about the network traffic.
After it is done it groups together the communication that has happend on the agents to see what kind of protocols that are often in use
For instance I see that there is alot of Unknown traffic happening on my agent, I can do a drill down to see more info about that particular traffic. Then I can see in detail where the traffic is going
I can also do a drill down to se what kind of process is initiating the traffic going back and forth. Something I would like to see in this, is the ability to add custom info, lets say for instance if I have a particular application running which uses some custom ports and processes I would like to add a custom name to that application so It can appear in the logs and in the overview.
Other then that it provides some great insight in what kind of traffic is going back and forth inside the infrastrucutre, and Microsoft has added some great common queries.
