What is adaptive response?

Products

• PacketShaper

Issue/Introduction

PacketWise has an innovative feature called adaptive response. I'd like to learn more about what it is and how it works.

Resolution

Adaptive response is a mechanism which enables PacketShaper to respond to the changes in the network environment. With adaptive response, PacketShaper is allowed to take immediate action to a network condition according to the measurement statistics the unit collects.

Adaptive response consists of the following five categories:

• Unit health agents – monitor the working load of the Packeteer unit
• Network health agents – monitor the efficiency of a class, and how a partition is currently being used
• Application health agents – monitor new traffic or traffic that falls in the default bucket class
• Host agents – monitor information from the host database; useful for identifying hosts that are using too much bandwidth or that be attacking your network (or under attack)
• User event emulation agents – monitor any measurement variable currently available on the Packeteer unit

Each agent has a status color as described in the following:

• Green – Normal operation
• Yellow – Marginal operation
• Red – Unacceptable operation
• Gray – Agent is disabled, absent, or has not yet received a value
• Blue – Not been able to measure its target

To see the status of your adaptive response categories and agents, go to the info tab.

When the state of an agent has changed (for example, from green to red), adaptive response creates an incident report. Incident reports show supporting data for the problem at the time it occurred, letting you see what just happened. Optionally, an action file can be initiated to respond to a status change. The action file is a script of commands which enables PacketShaper to perform a variety of actions, such as:

• Generate a graph
• Modify a policy for a class
• Create a traffic class
• Send out email, snmp trap, or syslog message
• Capture traffic flow or traffic history
• Turn on packetcapture

For more information about the adaptive response feature, see Adaptive Response Overview in PacketGuide.