Trimming Data From Your Captures For Space Or Privacy - Network Instruments GigaStor User Manual

3. Click the Schedule tab.
4. Select one of the following scheduling types. For the GigaStor active instance you should choose "Always"
unless you have a specific reason to choose a different option.
No scheduling—captures are never scheduled
Always—capture runs at all times
Daily at specified times—capture runs at same time each day
You must specify a capture begin and end time by clicking the Add button for each day you select.
Multiple time intervals are configurable, per day, if the times do not conflict.
5. In the Reserve scheduling for section, select GigaStor and click OK. You may receive a notice about
scheduling reservation. If you do, click Yes to change the scheduling.
6. Click OK to confirm and save your changes

Trimming data from your captures for space or privacy

Typically, packet headers contain the most useful information because they contain routing information and
protocol information. The packet payload counterpart, however, is sometimes wasteful to collect because most
troubleshooting is done just with the header.
Under these circumstances, you may want to truncate most payload data from the packet header(s). In Observer,
the result is a partial packet capture.
Some benefits of partial packet captures include:
Smaller capture sizes
More overall storage space for packet captures
Greatly increases the effective storage size of a GigaStor (or other capture buffer)
Performance metrics remain intact
Increased overall privacy
Least resource intensive capturing
Some disadvantages of partial packet captures include:
Not all network traffic is stored to disk
Forensics may be hindered without full payload data
Data stream reconstruction may not work
Most resource intensive capturing
Increases CPU utilization
To configure the GigaStor probe to trim all packet data beyond the first 64-bytes, choose Capture > Packet
Capture > Settings > Capture Options tab, and enable Capture Partial Packets (Bytes).
1. In the Observer analyzer, choose Capture > GigaStor Control Panel.
2. Click the Settings button.
3. Click the General Options tab. See
4. Enable the Capture partial packets option and choose how many bytes to include in the capture. The rest of
the packet beyond what you define is excluded and is not saved to disk.
It is possible to decrease or increase the default 64-byte partial packet capture size. Click the Change Size
button to set a custom value. From then on, each packets' bytes following the target value are discarded
from capture.
28 | GigaStor™ (pub. 25.Apr.2014)
Table 1 for a description of each field of the GigaStor General Options tab.