While TRex is a high speed traffic generator, we sometimes found ourselves in need of examining the packets being TX'ed or RX'ed.
Why do I need this ?
There can be several cases where capturing the traffic can be very helpful:
- Debugging
- Functional Tests
- Pre-Test Phase
Debugging
You might want to know if the traffic you are transmitting matches the traffic getting back from the DUT.
Perhaps you even want to know the complex profile you just created behaves as you want.
Functional Tests
Although functional tests can be done in a much lower bandwidth and even with a simple Linux box,
it is very handy to have this option available with TRex as well to allow more flexible tests.
If TRex can do so much, why not complete the package with another feature ?
Pre-Test Phase
Some complex tests may require an init phase:
For example:
Consider testing a network where a DHCP server is assigning IP addresses.
You might want to generate some DHCP requests, create a range of DHCP leased IPs and then generate
traffic that will simulate those clients.
Is it easy to use ?
Yeah !
To get a glimpse simply login to the TRex console, activate the console and try it out:
And if I need to filter out the packets while monitoring ?
So we have an even cooler option:
you can get all the packets redirected to Wireshark as if they were recorded on a live interface:
With Wireshark filtering the packets you can pretty much do anything you like: filter packets by size, type and etc.
To learn more visit:
https://trex-tgn.cisco.com/trex/doc/trex_stateless.html#_packet_capturing
Also, try out the video tutorial:
In order to learn more about our latest enhancements and advanced capabilities,
Please register to our TRex session that will be presented in the DevNet zone at Cisco Live Berlin 2017.
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