After dodging the huge US Secret Service contingent at the Clinton event at my hotel, I slid into the WildPackets booth at the Jacob K. Javits convention center where the 2nd annual Interop NY show is currently underway. I visited with Scott Haugdahl (Chief Technology Officer) and John Bennett (VP of Marketing) of Wild Packets to talk about some new announcements and to talk futures with them.

Just announced is their 3RU appliance giving WildPackets a turnkey appliance based OmniEngine that gives users the ability to create queries closer to the data source. So while this is definitely following industry trends, their mac client and Linux based appliance clearly shows that they have also been listening to the folks in the trenches. What I really wanted was to side track Scott into getting up on a soap box in regards to extensibility. It would seem that their open API is about a year old now and that today they’re announcing integration with the folks at Splunk for log and trap collection. With a developer network growing in leaps and bounds, the pair alluded to new plug-ins becoming available almost daily.

So while they may have gotten their start in protocol analysis they were quick to point out that they’re working with the APDEX alliance on using the technology under the hood to measure application response patterns to create an objective measurement of the user experience. It sounds very much like what the VOIP folks have done with MOS scores and is being pipelined by some past-NOC (past Interop Team Members).

Learn About Apdex and Fixing Performance Problems
The Apdex Alliance is the standards partner of the Interop Application Performance Day on May 1, 2006 in Vas Vegas. This is an in-depth educational program presented by Peter Sevcik of NetForecast and Mike Pennacchi of Network Protocol Specialists. Anyone interested in application performance issues, applying Apdex to managing performance, and how to improve performance should plan to attend. Click here to learn more.

One of the messages that both Scott and John really wanted to get across is that WildPackets isn’t interested in playing specs-manship by dumping in a whole bunch of legacy decodes that no one uses anymore. They’re more interested in digging deeper into the contemporary decodes and to provide a greater depth of analysis in their expert system. Scott’s example is that you don’t just want to know that there has been a reset, what you really want is why that reset happened in the first place. Instead of pushing their users into hugely expensive and proprietary stream storage systems, WildPackets has instead chosen to allow the user to use just about any storage available. (they of course had a disclaimer that speed will of course become an issue if you’re trying to capture a gig feed)

So with contemporary features and cost effective pricing Wild Packets is sounding like an enabling platform rather than an endpoint solution. For the curious, I’ve asked the folks in the booth to give me a screen shot of some traffic at the show.

If you click on this thumbnail you’ll be able to see a screenshot of some WildPackets data from the Interop Show in New York.

Brian Chee is the VOIP lead for this show and is a researcher at the University of Hawaii School of Ocean and Earth Sciences and Technology (SOEST). He is also a senior contributing editor with InfoWorld Magazine.