In case you haven’t seen it yet, the SolarWinds Engineer’s Toolset version 10.1 is now available and includes some pretty cool new stuff. One of the coolest pieces of technology that 10.1 added is the new and improved traffic generator, WAN Killer. I recently had a chance to chat with the Toolset engineering team about this new application and so I thought I’d post our discussion here.
Josh – So Steve, I know that we’ve been chatting about a new and improved traffic generator for a while. What can you tell me about the new version of WAN Killer?
Steve – Well, the first thing that you’ll notice about the new WAN Killer is that it’s not only offered as a classic Toolset tool but it’s also now a gadget within Workspace Studio and can be saved as a part of your custom tabs and workspaces.
Josh – That’s cool. I can imagine creating some specialized workspaces for doing load testing with bandwidth gauges, WAN Killer, CPU and memory charts, and etc. What else is new?
Steve – We also added the ability to tweak the types of traffic that you’re generating with WAN Killer so that you can not only generate more traffic but you can also specify the source port, source address, DSCP, and ECN parameters.
Josh – That’s wicked! So I can generate/simulate traffic with specific QoS parameters to see how the network performs with different levels of those specific types of traffic?
Steve – Exactly. Then, once you're generating traffic you can use our NetFlow applications to verify the traffic that's on the line by protocol, address, application, DSCP/ToS, and etc.
Josh – Sweet. What can you tell me about what you guys are cooking up for future releases?
About this time Floyd threw something at me (I think it was that old can of Spam what we keep around the office) and Greg threatened to shoot me (which he could do either on purpose or on accident as we’re going skeet shooting on Saturday morning at a club up in Dallas) so I backed off that part of the conversation. I will say that I saw some pretty cool stuff that they’ve been working on and that they’re now letting me test.
So, if you haven’t renewed your maintenance and downloaded the latest Engineer’s Toolset you’re missing out on some pretty geeky stuff… I'll also be posting a new video demonstrating the new traffic generator - WAN Killer, so stay tuned for that.
Flame on...
Josh
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