The snoop utility is a passive administrative tool that provides network traffic information. The utility itself generates minimal traffic and enables you to watch all activity on your network as it occurs.
The snoop utility provides traces of the actual SLP message traffic. For example, when you run snoop with the slp command-line argument, the utility displays traces with information on SLP registrations and deregistrations. You can use the information to gauge the network load by checking which services are being registered and how much reregistration activity its occurring.
The snoop utility is also useful for observing the traffic flow between SLP hosts in your enterprise. When you run snoop with the slp command-line argument, you can monitor the following types of SLP activity to determine if network or agent reconfiguration is needed:
The number of hosts that are using a particular DA. Use this information to decide whether to deploy additional DAs for load balancing.
The number of hosts that are using a particular DA. Use this information to help you determine whether to configure certain hosts with new or different scopes.
Whether UA requests a timeout or DA acknowledgment is slow. You can determine whether a DA is overloaded by monitoring UA timeouts and retransmissions. You can also check if the DA requires more than a few seconds to send registration acknowledgments to an SA. Use this information to rebalance the network load on the DA, if necessary, by deploying additional DAs or changing the scope configurations.
Using snoop with the –V (verbose) command-line argument, you can obtain registration lifetimes and value of the fresh flag in SrvReg to determine whether the number of reregistrations should be reduced.
You can also use snoop to trace other kinds of SLP traffic, such as the following:
Traffic between UA clients and DAs
Traffic between multicasting UA clients and replying SAs
For more information about snoop, refer to the snoop(1M).