In this chapter, you will have learned how to be a performance-monitoring guru. You should now feel comfortable looking at networks a different way. You should now feel comfortable facing every situation on the network and performing some critical analysis on it to find the problems, no matter how deep they run, and use a tool like Sniffer Pro and some good hardcore research to fully isolate and diagnose problems.

This chapter focused on getting you started down that path. This chapter might also have opened your eyes to what a network looks like and how it performs when designed poorly and when designed well. Most performance issues are the result of poor design. Poor design is encountered far too often to disregard.

Another point this chapter focused on is that you cannot use Sniffer Pro to give you the answers outright; you need to know how to extract those problems while using Sniffer Pro as a tool in your arsenal of tools.

This chapter also showed you other ways to monitor performance on your network to augment the use of Sniffer Pro. You learned what a baseline is, how to create one, and not to ignore baselining of other devices such as your servers as well as how to perform basic trending. All these practices are important because, if you do not know how your network performs normally, how do you know it is misbehaving?

In this chapter, you learned how to use the Sniffer Pro analyzer for...