NetScout this week plans to announce an appliance designed to give customers a better view of traffic crossing aggregated WAN links.

NetScout's nGenius IMA Probe works with the company's nGenius Performance Manager software to track application bandwidth consumption, traffic patterns and end-user activities on Inverse Multiplexing over ATM (IMA) networks. IMA lets companies with growing network traffic forestall upgrading to a T-3 line by bundling four to eight T-1 links, but the downside is that it's harder to view traffic patterns on these consolidated pipes.

Jim Mileski, a systems administrator at Financial Partners in Agawam, Mass., has been using the new probe for a few months and says it has made it easier for his team to manage IMA connections used to support the financial outfit's 54 branches.

"We had to put together a bunch of homegrown applications to verify some of the bare-bones data we needed, but for the most part, we lost all visibility of Layer 5, 6 and 7 traffic," he says.

Mileski says the NetScout probe helps him get a better feel for how network links are being used by employees and whether applications are configured correctly.

"We spotted an application making inaccurate SQL queries," he says.

Information the probe collects can be used to help plan where bandwidth needs to be allocated and how to better route application traffic.

The nGenius IMA Probe uses a passive tap to connect to a WAN link and make a copy of the traffic, which is fed to the probe and forwarded to NetScout's nGenius Performance Manager software.

The software, which performs analysis and generates reports, is installed on a dedicated server and can be accessed via a Web browser.

The probe costs about $23,000. The nGenius Performance Manager costs about $50,000.