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| CommTraffic Help Documentation |
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Besides expenses, CommTraffic is capable of reporting extended traffic statistics, broken down by local hosts, remote hosts, protocols, remote and local ports. The reporting capabilities of CommTraffic offer an unmatched possibility to know everything about the traffic on your local network. Please note that the extended traffic reporting capabilities are available in the Pro version only. Important note: Your computer may not have sufficient resources to use the extended reporting capabilities and may slow down or even freeze when you generate a report. Please read the Configuring CommTraffic for High Traffic Volume Networks chapter for instructions on adjusting the logging and reporting behavior of the program. For each host, the program can report incoming, outgoing, and total traffic, as well as calculate the percentage of the traffic generated by a host in the total traffic of the LAN. Each computer is identified by IP and MAC address. You may also replace IP and MAC addresses by human-readable names; just select the line containing the IP or MAC address that you would like to assign an alias to, right-click on it and select Create Alias from the pop-up menu. The Local IP Address column lists the IP addresses of the computers that generated the traffic, the Hostname column indicates the hostname to which the IP address resolves, the Incoming, Outgoing and Total columns show the traffic for each computer specified by direction, the Percent column indicates the share of each computer's traffic in the total Internet traffic of the local network, and the MAC column displays the MAC address of each computer's network interface. You can view the traffic statistics for various periods by clicking on the Period button at the bottom of the window and selecting the desired period or setting a custom period. You can view the extended traffic statistics for each local host, such as the remote hosts that the local host is connected to, the statistics broken down by IP protocols and by the remote ports used by each protocol. Click on the + sign next to each tree or press Enter or the Space button to expand it. The extended statistics are available only when the Detail View option in the display options for the report is enabled. The last line of the report displays total data for the Incoming, Outgoing, and Total columns. The Remote Hosts tree shows the list of IP addresses that the particular local hosts made connections to. The IP Address column lists the IP addresses of the computers that generated the traffic, the Hostname column indicates the hostname to which each IP address resolves, the Incoming, Outgoing and Total columns show the traffic for each remote IP address by direction. The IP protocols tree allows you to see the statistics by the three IP protocols: TCP, UDP, and ICMP. The Incoming, Outgoing and Total columns show the traffic for each local IP address by direction. You can expand each protocol tree even further to see the traffic statistics by the remote port numbers used in the connections. Again, the Incoming, Outgoing and Total columns show the traffic for each remote port by direction. Dragging the column header to the desired place will change the sequence of columns. You can hide certain columns by right-clicking on the header of a column and unchecking the entries that you need to hide. You can also sort the entries by clicking on the header of the corresponding column. 
Right-clicking on the Local Hosts list brings up the following menu: Expand All – expands all nodes. This option is available only if Detailed View is enabled in the Display Options menu. Collapse All – collapses all nodes. This option is available only if Detailed View is enabled in the Display Options menu. Period - allows you to select the host's statistics reporting period. Refresh - updates the list of displayed hosts. Create Alias – opens the Alias Editor window for adding an alias to the selected IP address, MAC address, or port number. SmartWhois – allows you to query a particular IP address or hostname using SmartWhois (if it is installed on your computer). Selection – allows you to select or deselect report lines, or invert the selection. Copy - copies all the information about the listed hosts, the selected hosts, the root nodes, or the contents of the specified column to the clipboard. Save - saves all the information about the listed hosts, selected hosts or the root nodes in one of the supported file formats. Print – allows you to print the root nodes, all nodes in the expanded mode, or the selected nodes. Options – opens a dialog window where you can change the appearance and the data display options of the Local hosts page. The behavior and appearance of the report windows may be additionally configured by right-clicking on the particular report window and selecting Options from the pop-up menu. The Options window for the report windows has the Data tab, not available for other program windows. This tab allows you to configure important reporting options, which are described below. 
Detailed view – turning this option off makes the program display only the root nodes for the particular report, greatly decreasing the time required to generate it. If you use CommTraffic to monitor a network with many hosts, we recommend keeping this option turned off. Turn it on only when you really need it. Please read the Configuring CommTraffic for High Traffic Volume Networks chapter for instructions on adjusting the logging and reporting behavior of the program. Move active items to the top – moves the traffic statistics items that have just been created/updated to the top of the list. When this option is selected, the headings of the columns become inactive, thus disabling sorting. Limit the number of rows displayed - limits the number of lines that are displayed in the Local Hosts window. Show aliases – check this checkbox if you would like to display aliases for IP addresses, MAC addresses, and port numbers that are stored in the program. Show aliases only – replaces the original value with its alias. Show aliases as well as numeric values – displays the alias and the original value. Display statistics by IP addresses/MAC addresses/IP and MAC addresses combinations – allows you to define the policy for aggregating traffic for a unique local host that may otherwise appear as multiple hosts. If you have DHCP enabled in your network, each computer with a unique MAC address is assigned a different IP address for every session. In this case, you should group the traffic by MAC addresses, instructing the program to display the traffic for each host in just one report line. In some cases, you may encounter different MAC address for each host. For example, if you replaced a network adapter and would like to combine traffic via the old and the new NICs in one report, you should group the statistics by IP addresses. If you select the IP and MAC addresses combinations option, the program will combine the traffic only for the hosts where IP addresses and MAC addresses match. Non-matching entries will be displayed on separate report lines. |
