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Wireshare is a FREE packet capture (sniffer) application that will “sniff” the wire and tell you EXACTLY whats going on all that way down to the binary level. When all other tools fail and your network issues get really tricky there always one tool that network engineers break out in case of an emergency. Ping plotter also is NOT free, but is not too expensive either, currently listed at $24.95 for a single copy. Ping plotter is very similar to WinMTR however adds some nice features like color coding network issues and graphing the ping response times.
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#Pingplotter vs winmtr windows
Imagine taking PING and TRACERT and combining it into a single Windows application for testing network latency in real time – that’s WinMTR.Īnother great application for troubleshooting network paths and latency is Ping Plotter. WinMTR is a great FREE tool that many people may not know about. If a reverse DNS entry can be found for the ip address, a host name will also be displayed. Here’s a good example of what a trace route looks like:Īs you can see, each “hop” along the way displays the latency for that hop. This can be a huge resource in understanding issue along a given data path to see if there is high latency, packet loss, or an ACL (access control List) in a firewall or router blocking the path. The big difference with trace route is that is tests every routed hop along the way from Source to Destination. Trace route (or Tracert on Windows machines) is similar to PING in that is uses ICMP packets to test the path from source to destination. Trace route is probably the second most used tool in the neteng toolbox. It can tell you very quickly how long it takes for a packets to get from Source to Destination TRACE ROUTE Think of PING like a network Sonar used in submarines. Allegedly an acronym for Packet InterNet Groper, ping sends out a simple ICMP packet to a destination IP Address and the receiving devices sends it right back. Ping is probably the most well known network testing tool used in troubleshooting networks. The network management industry is huge with a Market Capitalization of well over $3 Billion with lots of companies springing up almost daily to deliver a better mouse trap to find network issues.īut you don’t need to spend a lot of money to gain the visibility you need to see into your network and find your problems. Some are not free and are very expensive. There are a lot of great FREE tools out there you can use to begin diagnosing a network issue. But without the right tools to give us the visibility we need into the behavior of the network, we could just as well start unplugging devices randomly trying to find where the problem lies. Often times things like QoS, bandwidth throttling or quotas may turn out to cause us a lot of trouble when we least expect it. Any network engineer or administrator knows how tough it can be to troubleshoot some network issues.
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