Traffic Sentinel : Help
Help Index Top > Traffic > Top N

The Top N page displays top sources, protocols and connections.

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How do I navigate the network hierarchy?

The Filter bar at the top of the screen provides a way to navigate through the network hierarchy (see File>Configure to see how to group network devices). At the top level, a list of Zones is shown, once you have selected a zone, the view will drill down to only show information from the selected zone, and a list of Groups will appear. Select a group and the view will drill down to only show the information from the selected group and a list of Agents will appear. Finally if you select an agent, its Interfaces will be shown. Click on the links at any level in the path and you will move back up the tree to that level. Click on the Show Map button to view a map of the selected part of the network (see Sentinel:Maps>Layer 2). If a single agent has been selected an Agent Details button will appear. Click on the button to see detailed information about the agent (see Sentinel:Search>Agent/Interface). Finally, if a single interface is selected an Explore button will appear. Click on the button to see long term trends for the interface (see Sentinel:Report>Explore).

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How do I select the information displayed on the chart?

The following Filter options are available:

The charts can be divided into two broad categories: charts based on unidirectional packet flows (expressed in terms of source and destination addresses for packets) and charts based on bidirectional connections (expressed in terms of traffic in and out of clients and servers).

In order to see flow or connection based charts, there needs to flow data available from the network devices in the selected navigation path. You can see the availability of flow and counters data by the colors of the status boxes in the Traffic>Status view.

The following flow based charts are available:

The following connection based charts are available:

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How do I display information on items in the chart?

By default, the legend in a bar chart will reflect the top contributors to the latest bar. Click on any bar to see the top contributors during that minute (and any traffic they may have generated at other times). Click on the last bar to restore the default behavior of displaying contributors to the most recent minute. The gray part each bar represents traffic not attributable to the sources in the legend.

Click on links in the legend to perform actions on that item. The color boxes are also clickable, representing the entire row in the table. Clicking on an item opens a dialog box with buttons for each action.

One or more of the following actions may be available:

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How do I create a filter to select specific flows?

The simplest way to filter traffic is to click on the legend item and create filters based on the selected item (see How do I display information on items in the chart?). For more complex filtering tasks, the following instruction describe how to manually enter a filter:

The Where box is used to filter traffic queries so that only selected traffic is shown. A filter expression can be entered directly into the input box. Clicking on the OK button applies the filter. Clicking on the Clear button will remove the filter.

An easier way to construct filters is to click on the Edit button to display additional inputs used to construct the filter expression. The first input consists of a selection box containing attributes that can be compared, a selection box containing comparison operators and an input area to specify that values to be compared to the selected attribute. Clicking the Add button appends the comparison to the current filter. There are also boolean operator buttons (& and |) and bracket buttons that can be used to combine comparison expressions to form more complex filters. The filter builder only enables buttons and inputs when they are allowed in the filter expression that is being constructed. Once the desired filter has been constructed, click on the OK button to apply it.

Note: If you just want to filter on a Host or Protocol then it is easier to set the Host and Protocol options in the Filter bar, rather than constructing a Where filter.

A basic filter expression consists of the name of an attribute, an operator and a set of comma separated values. The allowed operators are:

Expressions can be combined using brackets and the boolean operators:

The following examples illustrate typical where filters:

Note: The special zone EXTERNAL refers to addresses that aren't contained in any of the CIDRs specified using File > Configure.

WARNING Care should be taken if a value in a filter expression contains any of the following special characters: (, ), &, |, !, =, ~, ",', \, comma or space. If the value contains any of these characters then the whole value string can be enclosed in single or double quotes, or the special characters can be individually escaped with a \. The following examples show different ways of using the value "Research & Development" in filters:

Note: Special characters typically occur because they are used in Zone or Group names when configuring Traffic Sentinel (see File>Configure). Care should be taken when filtering on zone, group or path attributes.

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How do I create a custom flow chart?

The charts at the bottom of the list, labelled Custom N by default, are configurable by each user. When a customizeable chart is selected, an Edit Columns button will appear immediately to the right of the chart name. Click on the Edit Columns button to reveal additional options. Each flow key will appear as an option button allowing the keys to be changed. Setting a key to None will remove it. An additional option button allows keys to be added. The Label field allows the chart to be named. Click on the Submit button to commit the changes.

Note:The number of custom charts can be configured using the Sentinel:Home>Settings form.

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