Practical Packet Analysis, 2nd Edition

Network Baselining

When all else fails, your network baseline can be one of the most crucial pieces of data you have when troubleshooting slowness on the network. For our purposes, a network baseline consists of a sample of traffic from various points on the network that includes a large chunk of what we would consider “normal” network traffic. The goal of the network baseline is to serve as a basis of comparison when the network or devices on it are not acting correctly.

For example, consider a scenario in which several clients on the network complain of slowness when logging in to a local web application server. If you were to capture this traffic and compare it to a network baseline, you might find that the web server is responding normally ...