Computer graphics processing and selective visual display system – Display driving control circuitry – Controlling the condition of display elements
Reexamination Certificate
1997-07-16
2001-04-17
Bayerl, Raymond J. (Department: 2173)
Computer graphics processing and selective visual display system
Display driving control circuitry
Controlling the condition of display elements
C345S215000, C345S215000, C345S960000
Reexamination Certificate
active
06219050
ABSTRACT:
BACKGROUND
1. Field of Invention
The present invention relates generally to the field of network management software products, and more particularly, to the field of user interfaces for network protocol analyzers.
2. Background of the Invention
As computer networking has exploded throughout the past decade, network protocol analyzers have become useful software products for capturing, analyzing and displaying information about packets that are transmitted over a network. A protocol analyzer typically has the capability to promiscuously capture packets (frames) generated by other stations (nodes) on the network, decode each packet into a meaningful description, and then display lists of these packets in the sequence in which they were captured from the network. The data that can be displayed with each frame typically includes:
a time at which the packet was captured, relative to some reference time, such as the time for one of the packets, where the time is either determined from a system clock, or the delta time between successive packets;
a length of the packet, in bytes;
one or more source node addresses, at one or more protocol layers (e.g. a TCP/IP packet on an ethernet would have both an ethernet and IP address of the source station);
one or more destination node addresses, again optionally at multiple protocol layers; and
a set of protocol decodes, preferably at each layer that the protocol analyzer is capable of decoding.
In conventional network analyzers, this information for a packet trace is displayed to the user in a packet trace table.
FIG. 1
illustrates a conventional packet trace table. The table includes a sequential list of packets, one packet per row, with columns for time, source and destination addresses, length, and the protocol decodes. The table is quite understandable to a network professional who understands the protocols and is tasked with solving network protocol and network device problems.
The maturation and standardization of networking protocols as well as the availability of cheaper, more powerful desktop, laptop and server computers has facilitated the migration from mainframe applications to distributed applications. As distributed applications are developed and deployed there is often the need to understand their network behavior.
Cases where an application's network behavior must be understood include troubleshooting poor performance of the application, determining how the application can be “tuned” to improve response time or increase network efficiency, and profiling the application to determine its impact on the network. A protocol analyzer is used in these situations because of its ability to capture and display the packets that the application sends over the network. However, the packet trace table displayed by conventional protocol analyzers makes it difficult to understand the overall traffic patterns over time.
For example, troubleshooting slow response time of an application may be difficult with a packet trace display. The significant delays in the sequence are not easily located. The user must scroll through the entire table, which may contain thousands or tens of thousands of rows, searching for a large time gap between a pair of adjacent packets. Tuning an application to improve its response time is difficult with a packet trace table for a similar reason, however in this case the additive effect of a number of smaller gaps is what is being identified. Often the resulting analysis is a tedious and time consuming manual identification and addition of the gaps.
Tuning an application to increase its network efficiency is also cumbersome when a packet trace table is displayed as a sequential list of packets. Particularly in multi-tier applications (applications where the client communicates with one server, which in turn communicates with another server, and so on) and multi-server applications (where the client communicates with multiple servers) it is difficult to quickly understand the source and destination of a packet.
Accordingly, it is desirable to provide a user interface for a protocol analyzer that makes the display of time based behavior of network packet traffic easy to understand, and thereby supports improved analysis of such behaviors.
SUMMARY OF THE INVENTION
The present invention overcomes the limitations of conventional user interfaces for protocol analyzers by providing a fully graphical, interactive diagram that displays both the time relationship between packets and the source and destination nodes of each packet. The user interface of the present invention is referred to herein as a “bounce diagram”.
A bounce diagram is a way of displaying packet trace information that preserves the time spacing of the sequence of packets (“packet trace”). In one embodiment, a bounce diagram includes a time axis divided into a number of time intervals. Each source or destination node that occurs in the packet trace is represented by a node line, which is parallel to the time axis, the various node lines spaced apart from each other. A node label is displayed at the beginning of each node line. Each packet in the packet trace is transmitted from a source node to a destination node. Each packet is then represented by a packet arrow, an arrowed line that extends from a node line for the packet's source node to the node line for the packet's destination node. The packet arrow is positioned relative to the time axis at a point that is proportional to the relative time at which the packet was sent by the source node to the destination node over the network.
In one preferred embodiment, each packet arrow is color coded (or otherwise visually distinguished) to indicate its size, preferably using a distinct color for each of a range of sizes (e.g. red for less than 100 bytes, pink for 100 to 512 bytes, and so forth). This color coding enables the user to immediately perceive the size variations in a stream of packets.
As an additional feature of the present invention, a bounce diagram may also include a packet density graph in each time interval. The packet density graph visually indicates, for example, using a bar chart, a percentage (or number) of all packets in the packet trace that occurred in the time interval. For example, if the entire bounce diagram spanned 5 seconds, with 1 second time intervals, and 1000 packets were transmitted in the 5 second period, with 50 packets the first second, 200 packets the next, 400 packets the third, 200 packets in the fourth interval, and 150 in the fifth interval, then the packet density graph would show 5%, 20%, 40%, 20%, and 15% of packets in the first through fifth time intervals. The packet density graph for the third time interval (40%) would be the largest in size or area, and scaled to represent 40% of the packets in the packet trace, relative to a scale for the packet density graph. Additionally, each packet density graph may also be color coded with the average (mean, median, or mode) packet size of packets in the associated time interval.
In the preferred embodiment, the bounce diagram is interactive. The user may move a mouse over a packet arrow to select the packet arrow, in response to which a pop-up window is shown detailing the underlying packet information for the packet, including the precise time, size, source and destination nodes, and protocol decodes for the packet.
Also, the user may zoom in on a region of the diagram, which increases the resolution of the time axis, and shows the individual packet arrows more discretely. Zooming is achieved by the user selecting an area of the bounce diagram between a starting and ending time. The bounce diagram is automatically redisplayed so that the visible portion of time axis corresponds to the time period between the starting and ending times. The packet arrows for packets transmitted in this time interval are likewise displayed with respect to the node lines.
The packet density graphs update accordingly to the size of the time intervals at the resulting resolution. In this way the user can easily view the packet tra
Bayerl Raymond J.
Blakely & Sokoloff, Taylor & Zafman
Compuware Corporation
Joseph Thomas J
LandOfFree
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