Hello,

Is there a way to have my remote agents perform the ping on tcp port 443?

I have 12 branch offices that connect to a webapp in the main office on port 443 and are reporting performance issues, I would like to have the agent which is installed in each branch simulates the connection portion as much as possible, ideally connect to the webserver on port 443 - it would be cool to be able to set the packet size, too.

Any thoughts?

thanks!
-jg

Hi, Jason.

You can use TCP port 443. Remember, though, that we don't actually do TCP connects - we're just doing a TCP SYN request to the specific port in question and measuring the response time (and we measure *any* response time, including a NAK / RST / whatever - it doesn't need to be a "Yup, I'm up" answer). The goal of PingPlotter is to measure network latency, and the TCP stuff does a great job of that.

OK, so how do you configure this?

Basically, you need to pass an additional parameter telling the remote
agent what type of packets to use. For the sake of example, let's say
you use this for the remote agent's URL (in Edit -> Options, (Settings Name), Engine, in your "Enter URL to remote trace server"):

http://yourserver:7464/

To change to the TCP packet type, add ?PacketType=TCP to the end so it
looks like this:

http://yourserver:7464/?PacketType=TCP

That will make the remote agent use TCP instead of the standard ICMP.
You can also use "UDP" for UDP packets, or ICMPRaw to use the ICMP Raw
Sockets version of packets. With TCP, it defaults to port 80 - to
change that, add the TCPPort parameter like this:

http://yourserver:7464/?PacketType=TCP&TCPPort=443

The packet size comes from the packet size in "Packet Settings", but remember that this is controlling the size of the TCP SYN packets, which are poorly supported in the network at anything besides 40 bytes. Since we only send a SYN packet, there is no opportunity to measure the latency of a data packet (remember that there is a whole handshaking sequence with TCP, and that doesn't do much to help us measure network latency).

Hopefully, this does what you need. Let us know!

- Pete

OK, good info to know - yeah, if I am simply sending the syn, padding the packet may not be of much value, except to maybe simulate the decent sized packet is actualy able to traverse the path.

My app is Citrix, which in general is may small packets anyway, so this is probably fine.

Thanks again!
-jg