The Omni platform, launched in 2003, is in fact a bundling of the 10/100, GbE, WAN and WLAN analyzers the company had been marketing since its foundation in 1990.
The latest release, version 3.1, brings the WLAN QoS and security functions that had already been developed for the discrete product for such networks, namely AiroPeek, said Chris Bell, European sales engineer for the Walnut Creek, California-based developer.
The security function means that, in addition to supporting decryption of network traffic for inspection using the Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP) mechanism, which is nowadays considered a rather weak solution, Omni also supports decryption of the more muscular WiFi Protected Access (WPA) system involving a pre-shared key, as defined in the 802.11i standard.
Meanwhile the enhancement to the 10/100 probe, a.k.a. EtherPeek, is something of an inverse process to the addition to Omni, in that the more advanced app monitoring features such as conversation flow analysis and settings to enable security policy enforcement were first made available within Omni.
Now you can not only see what apps are running, but how well they’re performing, said Bell.
He added that, where today WildPackets is monitoring apps and reporting on how long it is taking for them to respond, next year we’ll transform that response time into an Apdex rating, referring to the Application Performance Index created by the Apdex Alliance, which WildPackets joined in April.
