how do I track autocad usage?

I don't know anything about AutoCAD, but in situations like this I'd look first at server resource contention, and second at a full packet capture. NTA isn't going to give you much more than throughput.

We develop a deep packet inspection system called LANGuardian and I am going to have a look at this traffic in the lab. The main thing I want to check is what our application recognition engine makes of it as it uses different techniques to distinguish between binary and textual protocols. I will publish the results here as they may help you fingerprint the traffic.

Darragh

Hi There,

I ran a quick test here with a Win 7 client (192.168.181.139) running Autocad and the CadWorx overlay. The image below shows what network activity was associated with the client when Autocad and the CadWorx appplications were running.

From an application point of view (1) I did not see anything unusual. Some file share traffic as I saved the drawings out onto a Windows file share which you can see in (2). There is outbound connectivity with the Autocad website (3) and I assume this is to check for updates. If there was a slow down in my case I would be looking at connectivity to the file shares, as you can see below the AutoCad\CadWorx apps create tmp files so if access is slow the apps may suffer.

I did see reference in the CadWorx documentation that you can save data onto SQL databases so if you have this setup you may see activity on the default SQL port (TCP 1433)

Darragh

Darragh,

This does explain why we are starting to see degradation in the program. We have hundreds of files all xreffed into a model. If the program then creates temp files as they are working, the system would slow down to some extent based upon the quantity of files being accessed.

Thanks for the information.

Mike