Beeks Analytics for Markets monitors all incoming or outgoing network data that’s delivered using the TCP protocol, as seen at the Visibility Point.

TCP is a connection-oriented protocol, and will retransmit data which is not delivered successfully. TCP guarantees the sequential order of messages (sometimes at the expense of latency).

The Beeks Analytics for Markets template does not automatically breakdown traffic per TCP port, or distinguish between different TCP sessions that use the same protocol. However, breakdown of traffic per TCP port can be achieved by defining TCP Gateways. See Beeks Analytics for Markets Configuration Template for details.

The table below describes the timeseries metrics for the TCP protocol in Aggregators for Beeks Analytics for Markets.

Metric name	Directions	Description	Displayed in Beeks Portal?
Conversations	n/a	A network conversation is traffic between two specific endpoints. In this case, a TCP conversation is all the traffic between two IP addresses on the same TCP ports. In most cases, the TCP server port will persist, but the TCP client will be ephemeral (will be different for each new connection from that IP address to a given TCP server). The total number of TCP conversations observed at the Visibility Point is calculated and recorded every 10 seconds.	No
Packets per second (pkt/s)	Tx or Rx	The rate at which TCP packets are being observed at the Visibility Point. The rate is calculated and recorded every 10 seconds.	Yes
Bandwidth	Tx or Rx	The rate at which data containing TCP segments is being observed at the Visibility Point. The figure will include network processing overhead (network protocol headers, retransmissions, etc).	Yes
Microburst	Tx or Rx	The rate at which data containing TCP segments is being received (Rx) or transmitted (Tx), by this Dedicated Server, including network processing overhead (network protocol headers, retransmissions, etc). The rate is calculated using a 1 millisecond window, and the maximum rate seen over each 10 second period is measured and recorded.	Yes
Loss %	Tx or Rx	The percentage of TCP data which is not successfully acknowledged (and so which is assumed to be lost).	Yes
TCP out of sequence bandwidth	Tx or Rx	TCP data which is observed to be out of order, measured as bandwidth.	No
TCP retransmission bandwidth	Tx or Rx	TCP retransmissions, measured as bandwidth.	No
TCP round-trip time (RTT)	Tx or Rx	TCP round trip is a calculation of the latency between the Visibility Point and the External or Internal Entity, measured as a round trip. VMX-Capture calculates this measurement by observing the delays taken to acknowledge data during the conversation. Sometimes if a TCP conversation is heavily asymmetric (i.e. a lot more data in one direction than the other direction), it may be hard to calculate the TCP round-trip time for the sparse side of the conversation, and the resulting measurement will be less accurate.	No
TCP Zero Window	Tx or Rx	Each side of a TCP conversation advertises (at the start of the connection) their TCP receive window. This is the size of the data buffer that temporarily holds incoming data (before it is passed to the receiving application on the same host). If the sending side of a conversation sends enough data to fill the receiving side’s TCP receive buffer, it has to wait for an acknowledgment back from the host before it can send any more data. Each host can adjust this window during the course of the TCP conversation. When a TCP receiver gets overwhelmed with data being received on a particular connection, it can reduce its receiver window. In extreme circumstances, it will advertise a zero window size. This prevents the host from sending any further data, until it receives further acknowledgements from the receiving host. TCP Zero Window counts indicate that one of the hosts in the conversation is struggling to process the volume of data sent by the host. This will result in application delays. It should be resolved by application changes. Splitting the data across more TCP connections may resolve the issue, or application changes may be necessary to speed up the receiving application’s performance.	No
Missed bandwidth	Tx or Rx	This measurement captures where traffic is not seen and resequenced by the TCP decoder within VMX-Capture during the TCP window, but which the VMX-Capture can see is seen and acknowledged by the other side of the TCP conversation. This indicates that there is a problem with the packet mirroring configuration, or with the VMX-Capture server being overloaded. It indicates that the other TCP statistics cannot be relied upon during this time period. It can potentially also (in rare circumstances) indicate a problem with the TCP window configuration setting for the VMX-Capture TCP decoder. Checking to see which aggregator levels, as well as looking at Beeks Analytics and packet mirroring internal diagnostics, will identify where the issue is occurring.	No
Gaps	Tx or Rx	Similar to missed bandwidth, but as opposed to measuring the data that is missed, this statistic counts the number of gaps (i.e. how many times we get missed bytes, from above, with received bytes in betweeen). See ‘Missed bandwidth’ for further details.	No

These TCP metrics are available in the following Aggregators:

Aggregator	Aggregator Levels
TCP Stats	/VP/ExtGroup/Int Entity
TCP GW Stats	/VP/ExtGroup/Int Entity/TCP Gateway
TCP DS Stats	/VP/Int Entity
TCP ExtGrp GW Stats	/VP/ExtGroup/TCP Gateway

The Beeks Portal will display IP metrics per External Group or per Internal Entity, but cannot provide other breakdowns.

Dashboards for viewing TCP Metrics

Within VMX-Explorer for a Beeks Analytics for Markets deployment, the above TCP Aggregators are most commonly viewed within the Traffic Stats set of dashboards. An example Traffic Stats dashboard and associated navigation is described in the User Guide for VMX-Explorer.

For extra granularity within each External Group (for example, getting different statistics per type of API connection), the TCP GW Stats dashboard can be used. See the User Guide for VMX-Explorer for an example TCP monitoring dashboard.