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Colasoft Launches nChronos Network Performance Analysis Solution v4.1

With Customizable and Schedulable Reports

Tulsa, OK - November 13, 2013 - Colasoft LLC, an innovative provider of network analysis software and solutions, today announced a new version of its flagship product, nChronos, a Network Performance Analysis Solution. Customizable and schedulable reports are now available in nChronos 4.1, allowing network administrators to easily generate and schedule various reports on the traffic for a specific time period.

nChronos 4.1 provides 12 statistical system reports on:

  1. Traffic
  2. Addresses
  3. Communication
  4. Applications
  5. Top Talkers
  6. Alarms

    Users can customize reports for specific network scope, like addresses, network segments, and applications, based on 17 built-in report modules. Network Administrators will have comparison data for all reports. nChronos 4.1 allows more effective analysis as all data on reports can be compared with historical indicators. Both system reports and user-defined reports can be scheduled to generate hourly, daily, weekly and monthly reports, and sent to any email recipients specified.

nChronos 4.1 strives to provide greater convenience for network administrators through reports delivered by email. This reporting includes but is not limited to:

  1. Bandwidth Consumption
  2. Application Activity
  3. Trending Traffic
  4. Network Anomalies

    With the innovative comparison function, the reports can be presented to the management without any decorations because everything is already so designed for you.

In addition to reports, traffic alarms based on network segments are provided in nChronos 4.1, with 27 available trigger parameters. A Transaction Content Analysis window is provided for transaction logs to display the details of an application transaction, including the client and server IP and port number, the request and response time and content.

"The reporting and transaction analysis are great features we have added to nChronos because of customer demand", said Brandon Lewis, Director of Customer Support at Colasoft, "This new release makes nChronos a more comprehensive forensic network analysis solution for critical enterprise networks".

The evaluation version of nChronos 4.1 is now available at Colasoft website www.colasoft.com.

Colasoft nChronos Network Performance Analysis Solution v4.0

June 19, 2013 – Colasoft, an innovative provider of network management software and packet analysis solutions, today announced a new version of its flagship product, the nChronos Network Performance Analysis Solution. The new nChronos version 4.0 has enhanced application monitoring and alerting capability.

This release of nChronos provides the user with the capability of monitoring the performance and real-time availability of custom applications. nChronos has also added the ability to monitor transaction analysis of HTTP-based web applications. nChronos has the ability to monitor Standard Applications, Web Applications, and Signature Applications.

The nChronos Expert Analyzer module now offers the ability to perform Custom Reporting of network parameters. Additionally, in response to customer demands and industry trends nChronos now supports IPv6 analysis. The nChronos is fully supported on Microsoft Operating Systems running in 64 bit OS’s.

"Application monitoring and alerting are mission critical to many of our customers", said Brandon Lewis, Director of Customer Support at Colasoft. “This new release of nChronos provides users the capability to 'rewind' their network traffic and troubleshoot application issues as if it were real-time.”

nChronos 4.0 now gives network engineers the ability to monitor from the application to the packet level and set alarms that trigger when network performance parameters are exceeded or security conditions are tripped. nChronos performs like a Digital Video Recorder for your Data Network now alerting you of an issue before your phone rings.

A Free Evaluation version of nChronos 4.0 is now available at Colasoft website www.colasoft.com.

About nChronos

nChronos is a Forensic Data Recording application for real-time and historical analysis of high performance & critical enterprise networks including the following key features:

  • Back-in-time network analysis of historical traffic for forensics;
  • Benchmark and visualize trends of network performance;
  • 7x24 real-time network traffic capturing and recording;
  • Critical links monitoring & alerting;
  • In-depth network analysis for performance optimization;
  • Efficient drill-down for data-mining & index;

For more information, please visit http://www.colasoft.com/nchronos/index.php.

About Colasoft

Since 2001 Colasoft has been an innovative provider of all-in-one and easy-to-use software solutions for users to monitor network activities, analyze network performance, enhance network security, and troubleshoot network problems. Currently, more than 5,000 customers in over 80 countries trust the company's flagship product, Capsa Packet Sniffer, as their network monitoring and troubleshooting solution. Please visit http://www.colasoft.com for more information.

Colasoft nChronos Intro and Troubleshooting (by Tony Fortunato)

March 12, 2013

As an independent troubleshooter, I am always interested in tools that are portable and provide instant information.

Many times when I am looking at a customer’s problem, I cannot assume that they will graciously give me their SNMP strings or access to their network management system. That being the case, RMON and any other flavor of Flow would also be out of the question as well. Honestly, I hope a customer wouldn’t willingly give out that kind of information or access to anyone.

Since my background is protocol analysis, I tend to gravitate to those tools that work from the packet level. Of course I know this isn't always possible, but I'll take whatever I can get. And as the old saying goes, "Packets don't lie".

In this article I am showing you a quick peek at Colasoft's (www.colasoft.com) nChronos product which basically captures packets and uses a slick GUI to control how you report on what it just captured.

The trick with all packet capture tools revolve around a few critical points:

  • Make sure the packet capture tool can handle the flow of traffic it is monitoring. For example, in this video I used a laptop to monitor my internet link because I know it isn't a high speed link. I wouldn’t use this laptop to monitor a 100 Mb, or greater, since the packet loss would be high.

  • Understand your network topology and pick your monitor points carefully as well as decide how you intend to intercept this data. For example, do you use a tap, mirror/span or hub?

  • Pay close attention to what the tool does with all those packets to make post processing easier. I have seen protocol analyzers that can capture 1 GB or data, but struggle to load the same trace file it just created.

I also use this tool to investigate what is causing the 2 Mb/s data stream and why my WiFi performance is subpar.

Click here to read the source article.

Colasoft Capsa Data Packet Analyzer v7.7

February 26, 2013 – Colasoft, an Oklahoma company, is a leading provider of innovative, affordable, network analysis software solutions. Colasoft today announced the release of its latest Capsa Network Analyzer, version 7.7, a real-time portable network analyzer for wired and wireless network monitoring, bandwidth analysis, and intrusion detection.

In addition to Bandwidth Monitoring and Traffic Analysis, Capsa Enterprise now has Filters and Views to not only alert of a CyberAttack, but also provide the ability to perform detailed packet analysis to assess the impact of the CyberAttack. A Free Trial version is available for download at: http://www.colasoft.com/download/products/download_capsa.php

Capsa now has the ability allow network engineers to create custom alarm rules to monitor for network anomalies, such as excessive traffic throughput, excessive broadcast packets, suspicious conversations, and much more. Capsa 7.7 will now provide alarm alerts and email notification the moment an alert is triggered allowing you to react in minutes to a network violation or CyberAttack.

"Capsa is the only Packet Sniffer and Packet Decoder to provide an easy to use GUI combined with CyberAttack Detection features", said Brian K. Smith, Vice President at Colasoft LLC, "found only in a more expensive Intrusion Detection Application. Colasoft Capsa now offers the Network Engineer one of the most robust Bandwidth and Packet Analysis tools available."

With the release of Capsa 7.7 over 10 new decoders were added for protocols like; SIP, SDP, MEGACO/H.248, MGCP, Q.931, SAP, H.225, RMI, Oracle, MMS, GOOSE, SMV, and GMRP. Capsa also added several new VoIP protocols. Capsa inherently analyzes VoIP issues, like voice quality QOS, dropped packets and connectivity issues.

The following are brief descriptions for some of these protocols:

  • SIP (Session Initiation Protocol): a widely used protocol for controlling communication sessions such as voice and video calls over Internet Protocol (IP).

  • SDP (Session Description Protocol): a format for describing streaming media initialization parameters [RFC 4566].

  • MEGACO/H.248: known as Gateway Control Protocol, a recommendation from ITU Telecommunication Standardization Sector (ITU-T) which defines protocols that are used between elements of a physically decomposed multimedia gateway.

  • MGCP (Media Gateway Control Protocol): a protocol used for controlling media gateways on Internet Protocol (IP) networks and the public switched telephone network (PSTN).

  • Q.931: the ITU standard ISDN connection control signaling protocol, forming part of Digital Subscriber Signaling System No. 1.

  • SAP (Session Announcement Protocol): an experimental protocol for broadcasting multicast session information [RFC 2974].

  • H.225: part of the H.323 family of telecommunication protocols.

  • Oracle: a protocol used by Oracle database to transfer data.

Additionally Capsa now offers the ability to alert on "Suspicious Conversations", to track employee activity or even log and view IM conversations. Capsa helps not only identify "Top Talkers" but also help protect your company against internal employee theft of Intellectual Property.

Capsa 7.7 is compatible with Windows XP/2003/2008/Vista/Windows 7/Windows 8.
A trial version is available for download at:
http://www.colasoft.com/download/products/download_capsa.php

About Capsa

Capsa is an easy-to-use Ethernet packet sniffer (network analyzer or network sniffer) for network monitoring and troubleshooting purposes. It performs real-time packet capturing, 24x7 network monitoring, reliable network forensics, advanced protocol analyzing, in-depth packet decoding, and automatic expert diagnosing. By giving you insights into all of your network's operations, Capsa makes it easy to isolate and solve network problems, identify network bottleneck and bandwidth use, and detect network vulnerabilities.

About Colasoft

Since 2001, Colasoft, an Oklahoma Company, has been an innovative provider of all-in-one and easy-to-use software solutions for users to monitor network activities, analyze network performance, enhance network security, and troubleshoot network problems. Currently, more than 5,000 customers in over 80 countries trust the company's flagship product, Capsa Packet Sniffer, as their network monitoring and troubleshooting solution. Please visit http://www.colasoft.com for more information.

PCMag: The Best Products of 2012

Colasoft received the Best Products of 2012 Award from PC Magazine for Colasoft Capsa, one of our flagship software products designed for LAN and WLAN network monitoring, troubleshooting and analysis. Capsa gets a 4.5-star Editors' Choice pick for networking utilities.

The editors of PC Magazine note that Capsa is a well-designed, fairly user-friendly (at least for network admins), Windows-oriented network analysis tool that offers network admins deep insight into their networks without the steep learning curve required to learn the ins and outs of Wireshark, plus Capsa is heavier on data visualization.

Click here to read the source article.