Network TAP (Terminal Access Point or Test Access Point) is the most common hardware device used for network traffic capture purpose. A Network TAP is basically a hardware designed to access the traffic between two network nodes and mirror it into a monitor port where we can connect a third party Analysis tool to listen.

First, let me say that I know AWS doesn’t promise anything about network performance as it relates to packets. At best, they leave it as a multivariate calculus problem for the reader — inclusive of CPU performance, code optimization, MTU, and current network congestion under the VLANs. But still, I was curious to see if there was any correlation to Amazon’s published “Network Performance” and the actual packets per second metric I tested.

Just like the goblins, ghouls, and ghosts that’ll be walking down your street tomorrow night, network management can be scary. If you’re not a network expert (and don’t have one on your payroll), it can be intimidating to make changes to clients’ infrastructure for fear of taking the network down. Small actions can have a big impact.

Rapidly increasing IT complexity, customer expectations around application availability and performance, and the importance of supporting new digital initiatives and services, taken together, are placing unprecedented demands on Network Operations Centers (NOCs) and IT Operations teams inside large, complex organizations like yours.

Remember the customer who reported a hard-coded packet per second (PPS) limit in AWS? His use case was a reverse-proxy server to a very active database cluster, complete with heartbeats, keep-alive connections, and a heavy load of queries and traffic. When the network throughput was sustained for an hour or so, the throughput would drop despite increasing demand.

A customer of ours reported a limit on number of packets in Amazon’s EC2 instances. According to the report, it didn’t happen on all instance types, and didn’t happen all the time. Also, it was unrelated entirely to bandwidth or MTU. According to the report, packet transmission rates were limited the same as CPU on t2/t3 instances — each instance earns credits which, when exhausted, cause throttling.

Network performance monitoring and diagnostics (commonly referred to as NPM or NPMD) tools are valuable for IT Ops teams that want to maintain visibility into the health and performance of their networking infrastructure. They provide this visibility in two major ways: by retrieving diagnostic data from network infrastructure components (such as routers and switches) and by analyzing network traffic flow and quality of service through various techniques (such as deep packet inspection).