Abstract—Creating high quality network trace files is a difficulttask to accomplish on a limited budget. High networkspeeds may overburden an individual system running packetlogging software such as tcpdump, resulting in trace fileswith missing information and making analysis difficult orincomplete. High end specialized systems may perform thejob well, but may be out of reach due to financial constraints.To that end, we developed the Cheap Logger (CLog) systemwhich utilizes inexpensive COTS hardware to create highquality, complete network trace files. A scalable distributedstorage system enables the CLog system to expand andcontinue to create high quality, complete network data tracefiles even at extremely high data rates.

Cite: Chad D. Mano, Jeff Smith, Bill Bordogna, Andrew Matta, Dan Dugovic, Aaron Striegel, "CLog: Low Cost Gigabit Full Packet Logging," Journal of Communications, vol. 1, no. 7, pp. 17-23, 2006.