Packet microscope
When you are developing a Web application or trying to figure out why a Web app isn’t doing what it oughtta, being able to monitor the protocol exchanges between the Web server and the application is crucial.
TracePlus32 Web Detective (http://www.sstinc.com/webanal.html) from Systems Software Technology Inc. (http://www.sstinc.com) is an HTTP protocol analyzer for Windows 95/98/Millennium Edition, NT 4.x, Windows 2000 and Whistler, that spies on HTTP exchanges between any application on your PC and a Web server on your intranet or the Internet.
Web Detective provides performance analysis for individual packets, Web pages, and objects. For each HTTP packet captured, Web Detective shows the time it was decoded and the elapsed time from the request packet.
For each Web page, Web Detective shows the time it was received, total size of all objects for that page, accumulated download time of the objects, and the calculated baud rate for the request.
Finally, for each object downloaded for a Web page, Web Detective shows the time that it was received, the size of the object, the download time and the baud rate.
Web Detective can display four views of the HTTP exchanges: by protocol (essentially the contents of each packet); by pages; by objects; and by data.
With the software, users can:
* Measure performance of Web pages by accessing them directly via the Winsock API for either a single page or an entire Web site.
* Validate Web page links.
* Save and reload trace logs.
* Append comments to a trace log while a trace is running.
* Use Web Detective with multiple TCP/IP stacks by specifying the location of the WSOCK32.DLL file.
The latest version of Web Detective can display protocol information for Secure Sockets Layer transactions if the application uses the Microsoft WININET API (note that this is for Internet Explorer 4.x and 5.x, but not Netscape Navigator).
Web Detective is very easy to install, and I found out some interesting things about various third-party applications I was using -- for example, how much "chattier" than I expected many of them are.
Web Detective is definitely worth looking into if you are doing any kind of serious analysis or development of Web applications. At $150, the product is a good buy for your Web apps toolbox.
» posted by ITworld staff
Network World
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