Networking testing tools

In order to correctly manage your networks, you need appropriate network tools. Whether you are troubleshooting network problems, or optimizing performance — network tools will help you achieve your goals reliably and efficiently. There are different kinds of tools that you can use for your daily work as an admin. Other network tools combine several functions or are great all-in-one products. PRTG is your efficient solution for managing and monitoring your entire network. All of these tools are provided for free.

What is Server Management? What is SNMP? What is Virtual Server Management? What is Agentless Network Monitoring? What Is Virtualization? Network Testing Tools OpManager : All-in-one network testing tool ManageEngine OpManager is an easy-to-use, comprehensive network testing software designed for networks of all sizes and complexities. Need for a network testing tool: The elemental purpose of a network is to share resources efficiently.

It is crucial to establish periodic network testing with reliable network testing tools to: Understand the network's state Ensure the configuration changes work as expected Detect crippling network attacks Provide a top-notch end-user experience Challenges faced by an IT admin Even in a relatively small networking environment: Network tests are grueling for a network admin as they demand a substantial amount of resources and manual effort.

If multiple networking testing tools are employed, the tools have to be launched and stopped individually to perform each network test, which demands ample time. The network testing tools require a certain level of management such as allocating storage, clearing cache, starting and stopping necessary services, and ensuring open ports.

The management of multiple tools in itself becomes an intimidating task. Network performance testing with OpManager OpManager monitors physical and virtual servers, interfaces, switches, routers, firewalls, and any networking device in real time for over parameters. When the target device sends an ICMP echo response, the device is active and responding.

You can test the availability of all your servers, switches, routers, firewalls, and networking devices using OpManager. Proxy Ping is used to ping a target device using a Cisco router. The router acts as the proxy for the target device and responds to the ping request, and the status of the destination device is acquired. Like some of the other tools, you need to run the program on both computers you want to test.

On one computer, select Master from the drop down at the bottom of the window, go to the Bandwidth tab and click Start. On the second computer, select Slave, enter the IP address of the Master into the box, go to the Bandwidth tab and click Start. The Save button allows you to save the bandwidth chart as a bitmap image. Download AIDA To get iPerf running, download the zip archive and extract it onto two computers, then open a Command Prompt on each machine.

On the first computer run the following command which sets it up as the server. On the second computer, run the below command replacing the zeroes with the IP address of the computer running as the server. A speed test will be performed for 10 seconds giving the results in Megabits per second. Download iPerf. Run the jperf. Usage is pretty much the same as with other tools here, on one computer set the program as server and press the run button. The advantage here is most of the iPerf commands can be edited from checkboxes and text boxes.

Download JPerf. NetStress is a free and simple network benchmarking tool created as an internal tool by Nuts About Nets which was then released to the general public. To run a test, click on the 0. Download NetStress. Some of these tools require you to run an instance of the program on two computers, one as a client and one as a server.

You will be asked to enter the IP address of the server on the client so will need to know its local IP address. Experienced users will know how to do that but others might not be too sure. Here are some simple ways for less experienced users to get the local IP address of a computer. The result is full coverage against security threats, both known and unknown, without requiring heavy tuning or lengthy supervised machine learning training periods.

ManageEngine OpManager Plus is an integrated monitoring tool that allows for full visibility into networks, applications, and infrastructure. OpManager is written in Java and uses a local installation of Tomcat for its interface. A local database stores collected information and provides a communication path between the OpManager and plug-ins. The tool utilizes adaptive service intelligence technology to allow for continuous monitoring and analysis of network traffic data.

NETSCOUT, whose customers are largely enterprise organizations, combines network and application performance management to provide macro-level insights into performance, allowing for the identification of capacities and network shortfalls.

The product primarily offers fault and flow analysis and packet sniffing, though other services like cloud, database, and bandwidth monitoring are also supported. The company touts and continues to release a consistent stream of vendor-agnostic network monitoring sensors as well. Paessler also includes unified monitoring via a powerful dashboard that gives network administrators complete visibility of their entire IT suite.

Description: Plixer Scrutinizer is a network monitoring and network traffic analysis system that gathers network flow data and metadata from every network conversation. Scrutinizer also provides network forensics and security capabilities.

The product alerts network teams about traffic patterns, offers DNS integration, and provides full visibility into network information that typically stays hidden. Scrutinizer also allows administrators to peer deep into their network to see where threats are originating and how the network is being used.

Progress WhatsUp Gold is a comprehensive monitoring suite that covers infrastructure monitoring, application performance management, and network monitoring. WhatsUp constantly checks for network uptime and downtime, predicting connectivity problems before they happen. With WhatsUp, users can ensure that product installation and deployment is as quick and easy as possible without any misconfigurations. Progress offers both a web-based user interface and a traditional Windows application for managing different aspects.

Riverbed SteelCentral is a network monitoring and application performance monitoring tool that offers full network visibility, analytics, troubleshooting, and user monitoring. The solution is divided into two platforms based on company size.