What Is Traffic Analysis?
Network Analysis is the process of listening to and analyzing network traffic. This offers insight to identify performance problems, locate security breaches, analyze application behavior, and perform capacity planning.
Uses
Locate faulty network devices, identify device or software misconfigurations, measure high delays along a path, locate point of packet loss, identify network errors and service refusals, perform intrusion detection, identify malicious traffic signatures, passively discover hosts, operating systems and services, log traffic for forensic examination, capture traffic as evidence, test firewall blocking, analyze bandwidth usage, identify application protocols and ports, just to name a few.
Real-World Process Applications
Analysis tasks can be proactive or reactive. Proactive methods include baselining network communications to learn the current status of the network and application performance. Proactive analysis can be also used to spot network problems before they become excessive and affect network communications, and helps avoid problems before they are even noticed.
Reactive analysis techniques are employed after a network or performance issue is noticed.