It's often useful to understand how long it takes for a request to get responded to. This helps you gauge how well a client or server is keeping up. This type of measurement can also be done at different layers; however there are some tricks you'll have...

Microsoft publishes protocol documentation on MSDN that is intended to make it easier for others to develop interoperable implementations. “System Documents” provide overviews of system behavior for key systems such as Active Directory, File Sharing and...

Capturing a trace during a boot is a common task that can be difficult to accomplish. In fact the most fool proof way to capture all traffic at boot is to capture the traffic from a 3rd party capturing machine in promiscuous mode. But this requires you...

In certain instances, you start a capture and no frames are captured. Or perhaps the UI suddenly stops displaying new frames. The display doesn't indicate any dropped frames and you've already verified that your selected adapter is the one that should...

You might have run into an occasion when doing a capture from the UI that you are unable to save your capture. You might receive a message like "Not enough storage is available to process this command". The UI tends eat up a lot of resources...

If you have just upgraded to Windows 7, you might notice that you no longer see any adapters listed in your Select Networks selection. There is a very simple way to fix this problem. First run CMD as administrator. If you have not done this before, you...

Network traffic by nature is fragmented. Limits of various network packet sizes force protocols to chop up data into multiple frames. When you capture data or read it from a trace with the API (NMAPI) you see only the fragments by default. But as the...

We posted some videos to Channel 9   in the last 6 months or so, and I wanted to let everybody know about them. We have one set of video's that provide some insight into the Network Monitor API and process of creating experts. This series provides...

The TCP Payload often carries data that you want to access directly using the Network Monitor API. Below I will detail how to do this using a simple C++ example and the NMAPI. Why Not add a TCP.Payload Field? The TCP Payload can carry all types of payloads...

Behold the mysterious world of OpLocks (Opportunistic Locking). Often OpLocks will be disabled by a user or system administrator in order to help address a performance problem. And this practice might not always be the best course of action. Understanding...

In this "Trace Study”, we'll look at a case where the customer is seeing delayed write failures logged in the event log. Delayed write failures are reported when a file being written over the network is inaccessible for a time. Based on a trace taken...

When you use NMCap to capture data you have an option to save the capture files as a chain. As the current capture file format has a limited size, this option allows you to continually capture the data in successive files. This also gives you some flexibility...

I have a friend who just received his Windows Home Server. Home Server allows you to access it remotely so you can share photos, Remote Desktop and backup documents. The provided documentation includes details on how to setup your router, open ports,...

Performance problems suck...time! But years of "Where's Waldo" has trained our brains in preparation for this moment. The TCP Analyzer expert, available from our Experts Download Page[ http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=133950] takes advantage...

Last week I attended Sharkfest 09 at Stanford CA and I had a wonderful time. It was great to talk to other network geeks like me to better understand this community and see how various tools can be used to illuminate the cloaked world that is your network...

If you don't already know, we have been updating the our parsers for Network Monitor on http://www.CodePlex.com/NMParsers every month. Most recently we have updated the Windows parser set to support Windows 7 protocol updates. In the June parser release...

Event Tracing for Windows, (ETW), has been around for quite a while now as it was introduced in Windows 2000. It's basically instrumented logging that describes what a component is doing. Conceptually, it’s something like the proverbial printf("here1...

We'd like to announce that we are opening a Network Monitor forum on TechNet . We also have forums hosted on Connect.Microsoft.com, but these are focused on our betas. We'll answer questions about filtering, using the Network Monitor API, writing parsers...

One of the major new features in Network Monitor 3.3 is the ability to run experts directly from the UI. And now NMTopUsers is available from our Experts Portal . Plus as it's a CodePlex project, we have opened the source code as well. It's a fairly simple...

Guest blog by Tawanda Sibanda, Lead Program Manager for Network Monitor Ladies and gentlemen … the Microsoft Network monitor team is excited to announce the release of Network Monitor 3.3. A record 7 months after version 3.2 this is our quickest release...

Guest Blog by Michael Hawker A little earlier, we talked about the new Expert system available in Network Monitor 3.3. With our release on the horizon, we wanted to give you a little more insight into the usefulness of Experts and what they can do. Presently...

Often when a trace is passed around for analysis, the people involved discuss the behavior observed in out-of-band channels, such as email, attached documents, etc. How primitive! Wouldn’t it be nice if you could just “mark up” or “annotate” the trace...

It’s time again for a new Beta version of Network Monitor. Using your feedback we’ve added some compelling new features! One in particular is the ability to launch experts from the UI. And what use would this be without something to launch? We’ll also...

I know many have asked about this in the past. And now it’s finally here, a shiny new Microsoft SQL Tabular Data Stream Protocol or TDS as we often refer to it. Simply go to www.CodePlex.com/NMParsers and install the latest release. I’m sure some of you...

Hi! I’m the Group Program Manager for Microsoft’s Protocol Engineering Team. Our team includes those who bring you Netmon. We are approaching our Beta of version 3.3. It’s the most exciting protocol analyzer on the planet, in my humble opinion. The team...