SMT: a system monitoring tool for DCE

Understanding interactions among various components in a distributed system is very important for system administrators and application developers. The System Monitoring Tool (SMT) provides the ability to view OSF/DCE traffic at multiple levels of detail, which makes this tool useful to application writers as well as people debugging protocol. SMT allows simultaneous monitoring of multiple network segments and provides protocol aware decoding of Re mote Procedure Call (RPQ activity. SMT consists of two components: a remote monitoring agent to capture packets, and a host workstation software program which analyzes and groups the captured packets according to their RPC transaction. The RPC can be viewed at multiple levels of granularity, from raw packets to complete RPC transactions. The tool is an applied example of hierarchical specification of communication protocols.