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There are ingress timestamps - specifying the moment the first bit of the packet was received by the device - and egress timestamps - specifying the moment the first bit of packet was transmitted out of the device. It’s used to specify the moment a packet is forwarded through your network access device. In a nutshell, a timestamp is a snapshot of the local system time, associated with incoming and event outgoing packets. Almost all of their features require accurate timing, in other words, they need to support timestamps.Ī timestamp is a sequence of characters that can help you identify when a certain event occurred, by giving you the actual date and time of day, sometimes accurate to a small fraction of a second. An accurate time information is important for legal and criminal investigation, and the same applies for an accurate forensic analysis.Įfficient visibility platforms should include advanced network access devices (including Network TAPs and Network Packet Brokers) to forward data packets from their source to their destination. The ability to timestamp packets with high precision is, therefore, essential to understanding what is going on in the network at a packet-by-packet level. In other words, they need products that have the ability to capture and correlate packets for a chance to early detect and prevent threats. To be able to counter (and even prevent) virtual attacks or system errors, these teams need complete access and visibility to their networks. There isn’t a security team out there that hasn’t struggled at least once with critical virtual threats. This increasingly vulnerable digital world has made cybersecurity a priority for companies worldwide, small or big.
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For instance, tracing the arrival of packets gives you an idea about the original traffic, so that you can calculate perlink metrics, like utilization figures, or performance of applications, such as TCP flow throughput, delay, and jitter. Network packet timestamping can be used to investigate various events that, one way or another, have affected your network performance.
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This feature can not only prevent and analyze cyberattacks, but it can also allow you to examine trends and network latency. Everything happening on the network is time sensitive, that’s why timestamping packets are extremely important when we’re talking about packet capture and analysis.
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