“It’s easy to make things hard.
It’s hard to make things easy.
It’s usually better to do the latter.”
SharkFest ‘11 Keynote speaker Steven McCanne
The folks from CloudShark made it to Sharkfest ‘11 this year on the Standford campus in Palo Alto, CA. We heard a great keynote yesterday from Steve McCanne (CTO at Riverbed) about some of the thinking that went into the development of the Berkeley Packet Filter (bpf) and the creation of libpcap. What a great story!
QA Cafe Introduces CloudShark™, a Secure Cloud-based Solution for Storing and Sharing Packet Capture Files
Virtual Platform Enables Enterprises and Service Providers to Accelerate Troubleshooting and Protect Capture Files from Data Breaches
PORTSMOUTH, NH, June 6, 2011 — QA Cafe, a leading provider of IP testing solutions, today announced the availability of CloudShark, a secure platform for storing and sharing packet capture files. Network engineers, VoIP service providers, and other IT engineers rely on capture files, which record network traffic, to troubleshoot applications and networks. Using CloudShark, authorized engineers can upload capture files to a secure software repository. They can tag capture files to make them easier to find and annotate them with comments and questions. They can also share files with other engineers, who can access the files through CloudShark’s secure browser-based interface. CloudShark enables users to view capture files from any device with a Web browser,including smartphones or tablets such as iPads. The CloudShark platform is available as a software-only virtual appliance or a turn-key, rack-mountable 1U hardware appliance, the CloudShark PCA1000.
TalkFree, a leading provider of VoIP services to resellers, is using CloudShark to share capture files among its operations and support teams and its customers. “CloudShark gives us the ability to analyze and resolve issues much faster,” said Colin Brown, director of network operations at TalkFree. “We deal with over 100 carriers on our platform, so we have an abundance of SIP trace files to manage, and they are much easier to administer using CloudShark’s centralized storage. Rather than emailing files back and forth, now we simply email a link and our engineers and customers can view a file on a mobile device such as a smartphone or iPad. We’re very pleased with the CloudShark solution and so are our customers. When they see it they say `What’s this? I want it.’”
“Capture files are invaluable assets for network analysis and troubleshooting, but until now IT organizations have had no way of securely organizing and sharing their capture files,” said Joe McEachern, founder and president of QA Cafe. “CloudShark makes it easy for engineers to collaborate, even if they’re not carrying network analyzers. CloudShark also helps organizations ensure that capture files containing confidential data never fall into the wrong hands, leading to a data breach or violation of regulations such as HIPAA or SOX.”
QA Cafe has launched an Early Adopter program for CloudShark. For details, please write to sales@cloudshark.org or call 1 (877) 332-0784 in the U.S. or Canada.
About QA Cafe, LLC
QA Cafe, a privately held company headquartered in Portsmouth, NH, is a leading provider of IP testing solutions that allow telecom and datacom developers and test engineers to quickly and reliably test crucial IP functionality. The company developed CloudShark to make it easy for testers, network managers, field technicians, and other IT engineers to securely store, manage, and share packet capture files. QA Cafe’s flagship test product, CDRouter™, is used today by most of the major manufacturers of routers and CPE devices in the Far East, North America, Europe and Asia. For more information about CloudShark, please visit www.cloudshark.org.
CloudShark Updates and Introducing the New CloudShark Appliance
You may have noticed some changes at CloudShark.org. We’ve redesigned the home page to include a drag and drop widget. Now using CloudShark from your computer is even easier than before. Just click and drag your capture files from your desktop onto the drag and drop widget. CloudShark will automatically upload them. You can also click to open a file browser as before.
We’ve also rebranded the site to introduce the new CloudShark Appliance. The appliance brings CloudShark into your own network. It also adds additional features not available on the free site - user management, packet annotations, file tagging, and security. Click on over to http://appliance.cloudshark.org to learn more.
Below is an example of the new annotation feature in the CloudShark Appliance.
New Paint
If you haven’t stopped by cloudshark.org in a while, now’s your chance. We’ve touched up the colors everywhere in preparation of something BIG (And we don’t just mean another t-shirt giveaway).
Check back often, and keep uploading those captures files!
CloudShark November Updates
We’re very happy to announce today that CloudShark has been updated with a few cool new features that will help you navigate larger capture files.
Navigation Sparklines
The first thing you will notice in the toolbar is our new Navigation Sparkline. Capture files can be long, dense, and it can be difficult to narrow down exactly what you are looking for. This new control shows you an overview of the packet activity in your capture file, and allows you to zoom in on a particular section.
Sliders can be moved to highlight peaks or valleys in the traffic. Applying a filter to the capture works just like before, with the added benefit of seeing what matches the filter within the selected range of the capture file.
Want to isolate a huge spike? Highlight it, and then check your filter to see if a given IP address was involved. Just as before, the full graph view will show traffic matching the filter over the whole file.
Larger File Sizes
CloudShark will now accept files of up to 5 Megabytes, and has removed limitations on the maximum number of packets per file.
Infinite Scrolling
The biggest problems we had with CloudShark and large files was loading all of the packet summaries into an HTML table. Beyond a few thousand rows, the browser’s performance really degrades.
CloudShark now does what we like to call “infinite scrolling.” We load and unload large chunks of the packet summaries as you need them. The screen only shows 20-30 packets at a time, so we dynamically load new rows as you scroll towards them, and prune off old rows after they’ve been seen.
Enjoy!
Just letting everyone know that the CloudShark team from QA Cafe is going to be at the TechWorld2010 expo tomorrow (Thursday) and Friday. Stop by and say hello if you’re there!
OSI Protocol Model
Anyone who considers protocol unimportant has never dealt with a cat. - Robert A Heinlein
Not many protocols ever mapped cleanly to the 7 layer OSI Protocol Model. But these, days, you have to know what you are looking at and some general context.
Look at this fun packet:
http://www.cloudshark.org/captures/bb145a6714b3?filter=frame.number==3
I wonder what is the record for the highest number of recognizable protocol layers in one packet?
Want a free CloudShark tee shirt? Its simple, just follow @CloudShark on twitter and send an email to info@cloudshark.org including your twitter name, tee shirt size (S, M, L, XL) and postal address. We’ll do the rest.
We are running this promotion until we run out of shirts and we’ve been sending shirts all over the world. Bonus points if you send us a picture with you wearing your new CloudShark shirt.
