What is the difference between Discarded and Dropped Packets in ADA?

Products

• CA Application Delivery Analysis MTP (NetQoS / ADA)

Issue/Introduction

Question:

What is the difference between Discarded and Dropped Packets in ADA?

Answer:

A dropped packet is a packet that arrived at the NIC, but that ADA was not able to look at because ADA was too busy processing other packets and the packet capture driver's buffer was at a full state before it could be emptied.

A discarded packet is one that ADA obtained properly from the packet capture driver, but which was outside of ADA configuration, so ADA made no use of the packet. There is no notification of this in the ADA GUI. The discarded packet count is in many ways a measurement of misconfiguration. Either the router is mirroring the wrong traffic (or too much traffic), or ADA's configuration is set up to monitor different data than what is being mirrored.

Environment

Release: SAMCNH99000-9.3-NetQoS-SuperAgent-Management Console-Hardware
Component: