In my previous blog entry, I gave a history lesson on the rise and fall of the NetGen Empire, and why being acquired by NetScout won't help either of them. Although there are many reasons why this will be the case, a glaring lack of APIs and extensibility, an area near and dear to me as a Developer Evangelist, is an obvious one.
In sharp contrast to the closed box mentality of the NetScout and Network General applications, is WildPackets' OmniPeek product line. WildPackets continues to innovate with major new releases, each one improving on every aspect of the technology, including the gorgeous user interface. With the most recent release of the OmniPeek 5.0 product line, WildPackets became the first vendor to offer 802.11n wireless analysis. This is huge, and nobody else has it.
As a solution, the OmniPeek product line has API's coming out of its ears, a developer network with 3000 members, a developer website with all kinds of useful extensions and source code, and a full-time Developer Evangelist and Custom Engineering Team. The plug-ins and source code on the WildPackets Developer Network, also known as the WPDN, are free to maintenance customers.
As the needs of WildPackets'™ customers change, the API's allow the products to be extended to meet those needs. Two examples of this are automation and analysis. Many companies use OmniPeek to test their own products, which they do over and over again. With WildPackets API's, the analysis on the back-end can be developed as plug-ins, and the tests themselves can be automated through API's on the front-end.
These API's have allowed WildPackets to integrate and partner with other vendors like Cisco, Aruba, and AirTight. These companies offer Access Points and Probes that can be used by OmniPeek to collect packets from different channels of the wireless network. What's more, the API's allow packets from multiple probes to be aggregated in real-time into a single capture. This solution, called Multi-Channel Analysis (MCA), allows engineers to perform roaming analysis and other types of analysis across channels. This measurement, up till now, has been a laborious and time consuming task that wireless engineers have performed by hand.
And the list of integration partners goes on and on, particularly in the area of wireless cards, where OmniPeek has more support for different wireless cards than any other vendor.
The most famous and innovative example of integration is the Google Map Plug-in, which maps the IP addresses captured by OmniPeek into the Google Map. However, the biggest demand is for application layer viewers for email, instant messaging, web pages, and so on. The API’s make it possible for WildPackets to keep up with the application layer viewing needs of its customers without changing the core product.
To aid the developer community in the creation of plug-ins for the OmniPeek product line, WildPackets has developed a Plug-in Wizard that integrates with Microsoft Developer Studio. This wizard generates plug-ins, with source code, allowing the developer to quickly create plug-ins, over and over again. This makes rapid prototyping and development of custom solutions easy and cheap.
Although scripting and plug-ins are the two primary ways to extend OmniPeek, other API's are available as well, and I will be talking about them in the future.
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