Network Monitoring Software

What do network monitoring software systems do and why are they important?

Network monitoring software is designed to provide automated support for some or all of the network management functions. Network monitoring software systems are used to perform some of the functions of monitors and analyzers, identify errors, run diagnostic tests, monitor an entire network, compile statistics, and prepare real-time management reports. Network monitoring software systems are important because they signify improved or deteriorating conditions.

There are dozens of network management tools available. Some software tools support configuration management, some support performance and fault management, while some attempt to do both. Some tools have modules to support the help desk providing end user support.

Network Monitoring Tools Types

There are three fundamentally different types of network management software.

  1. Device management software provides information about devices. They enable the network manager to monitor important devices such as servers, routers, and gateway, and typically report configuration information, traffic volumes, and error conditions for each device.
  2. Systems management software provides ESD and analyzes the device-level information provide more useful network-level information.
  3. Application management software tracks information about mission critical applications that run on the network. “Smart” network devices perform their functions and also record data on the messages they process.

These data can be sent to the network manager’s computer when the device receives a special control message. If the device detects a critical situation it can send a special control message (called an alarm) to the network manager’s computer. The two most commonly used network management protocol standards are SNMP and CMIP.

What is the Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP)?

The simple network management protocol (SNMP) originally was developed to control and monitor the status of network devices on TCP/IP networks, but now it is available for other network protocols (e.g., IPX/SPX). Each SNMP device (e.g., router, gateway, server) has an agent that collects information about itself and the messages it processes, and stores that information in a database called the management information base (MIB). The network manager’s management station that runs the network management software has access to these MIBs. Using this software, the network manager can send control messages to individual devices or groups of devices asking them to report the information stored in their MIB. As the name suggests, SNMP is a simple protocol with a limited number of functions.

Characteristics of good monitoring templates:

  • Clarity
  • Conciseness
  • Rich content: Content of templates should include information enabling the readers to take proper decision or action.
  • Timeliness: The templates should include detail timing information of incident and historical perspective of incident.
  • Relevance to  audience
  • Compatibility with current network tools: The templates should be reproducible or easily understood in the context of network tools in use. For example, if a template calls for certain network statistics then the current network tools should be able to provide those network statistics accurately.
  • Conformance to standard industry practices

 Examples of bad templates:

  • Templates that are hard to understand
  • Templates that have inadequate content
  • Templates that have insufficient information
  • Templates that are not clearly organized
  • Templates that are too difficult to produce

Network Monitoring Software Short List

  1. ActionPacked
  2. Aqualogic Monitoring System
  3. Argus
  4. CapMon
  5. EdoceoEntuity
  6. Ethernet Packet Bombadier
  7. Express Metrix
  8. FrameFlow
  9. KACE
  10. LANGuardian
  11. Luminet
  12. Nectar Services
  13. Netflow Tracker
  14. Network Sate Notifier
  15. Praetorian Guard,Speed Test
  16. Visual Performance Manager (VPM)

Network Monitoring Software Long List

Network Monitoring Software: Commercial Monitoring Tools, not integrated with an NMP

Analyzer/Sniffer | Application/Services/Systems monitoring (Hosted/managed monitoring services) | Emulators | Flow Monitoring | FTP | IPAM | IT Search | Network Security tools | SNMP Tools | Topology/Traceroute | VOIP | Video-over-IP

  • ActivXperts Network Monitor monitors servers and workstations in your LAN and WAN. The software monitors Windows, UNIX, LINUX and Novell servers for availability.
  • AlertCenter provides monitoring, alerting and corrective action automation scheduling. It is part of the MKS Toolkit.
  • AlertSite measures, diagnoses, notifies and reports on the availability and performance of servers, URLs, web applications and virtually any Internet connected device or application.
  • Analyzer/Sniffers, see also public domain capture tools.
    • ACE Analyst from OPnet is a transactional analysis solution, based on network packet captures.
    • Anritsu provide the MD1230 portable network and IP network performance monitor.
    • Anasil , Analyzer is a software network analyzer of Ethernet networks for Windows 95/98/NT/2000.
    • Anue Systems, makes a Net Tool Optimizer that is used to connect multiple monitoring tools to a network link, or one tool to multiple links. This is a hardware device. It is similar to Gigamon.
    • APCON, manufactures a physical layer matrix switch to remotely move and share network monitoring tools using a software interface or scripting.
    • ClearSight provide a Monitoring/Analysis/Network Recording/Sniffer (up through 10Gbits/s), Packet generator. ClearSight’s solutions are graphically oriented.
    • Capsa Capsa performs real-time packet capturing, 24/7 network monitoring, protocol analysis, in-depth packet decoding, and automatic expert diagnosis.
    • CommView is a program for monitoring Internet and Local Area Network (LAN) activity capable of capturing and analyzing network packets. It gathers information about data passing through your dial-up connection or Ethernet card and decodes the analyzed data.
    • Cubro provide a network processor based packet handling engine (packetmaster) and software to sniff and analyze packets on multiple links and can eliminate duplicates appearing on multiple links.
    • Distinct Network Monitor is a software packet capture and network protocol analyzer for Windows that translates complex protocol negotiation into natural language, pinpointing where errors occurred.
    • Easy Service Monitor (ESM) will monitor network services to see if they can work properly with a predefined time interval. It runs on Windows.
    • EffeDetect an HTTP packet sniffer, protocol analyzer and file reassembly software based on windows platform. Unlike most other sniffers, it is dedicated to capture IP packets containing HTTP protocol, rebuild the HTTP sessions, and reassemble files sent through HTTP protocol. Its smart real-time analyzer enables on-the-fly content viewing while capture, analyze, parse and decode HTTP protocol.
    • EtherDetect provides a connection-oriented view for analyzing packets.
    • Etherpeek for Windows is an Ethernet network traffic and protocol analyzer designed to assist in troubleshooting and debugging mixed-platform, multi-protocol networks.
    • Finisar provide sniffer like stand alone network test and monitoring devices for 10/100/1G and iSCSI, Infiniband and Fiber Channel.
    • Gigamon Provide a hardware switch to enable connecting a sniffer to multiple links.
    • IPCopper provide an appliance for monitoring network trafic by sniffing it.
    • IP Traffic Monitor provides real-time information about network utilization for each application and store information into a database for history review.
    • Javvin Packet Analyzer software-based network analyzer monitors Ethernet and WLAN traffic in real time, and decode packets and displays in.
    • LANExplorer provides packet capture, decode, filtering, matrix, host table, statistics, theresholding and alarms for Windows hosts.
    • LANGuardian captures and analyzes the traffic flowing through your network switch, stores it in a database, and displays the details in a web browser.
    • LANSurveyor SolarWinds automatically discovers your LAN or WAN and produces comprehensive, easy-to-view network diagrams that integrate OSI Layer 2 and Layer 3 topology data including switch-to-switch, switch-to-node, and switch-to-router port connections.
    • LANWarch Windows software-based network packet analyzer monitors traffic in real time and displays a wide range of statistics in graphical form.
    • LinkFerret tools are designed to provide a comprehensive set of monitoring utilities and packet sniffers to be used for capture, statistical analysis, and protocol decoding in your Ethernet network. It runs on Windows 98/NT4/2000/XP.
    • Netquest OptiCop Converger: Optimizes Network traffic for better utilization of network monitoring tools through the use of link aggregation, packet filtering and interface/protocol translations capabilities.
    • Network Probe is a Windows or Unix network monitor and protocol analyzer providing a picture of the traffic situation on your network and enables you to monitor network traffic in real time, hunt down, identify, and isolate traffic problems and congestions on your network.
    • NetworkActive PIAFCTM (Packet Intercepting, Analyzing, File Constructing Traffic Monitor) network traffic analyzer; packet/protocol analyzer, HTTP file rebuilder, graphical traffic mode (graphical overview of current network communications), and traffic statistics mode. There is also a free for personal and commercial use version that provides a network traffic analyzer plus a packet/protocol analyzer and HTTP file rebuilder.
    • NetScope Graphical network visualisation tool with per-second resolution, real-time and historical data.
    • Observer from Network Instruments is a network analyser (Packet sniffer) for 10/100/1000 100/1000 Full Duplex and Multi trunked Ethernet links, wireless a,b an d g, token ring and FDDI.
    • PacketBoy is a Win9x/NT & Unix packet sniffer analyzer decoder package capable of decoding many of the commonly used LAN protocols.
    • PRTG Traffic Grapher Windows software to monitor bandwidth usage and other network parameters via SNMP. Has a builit in packet sniffer. Freeware also available.
    • Sniffer resource for product information on both portable and distributed Sniffer protocol analyzers, network troubleshooting white papers, Sniffer University training courses, and free protocol stack posters.
    • Sniff’em is a Windows based Packet sniffer, Network analyzer and Network sniffer.
    • Ultra Network Sniffer for Windows lists network packets in real-time from multiple network cards and also supports packet capture.
    • Unsniff Network Analyzer. Scriptable and extensible network analyzer with fresh new views of protocols URL.
    • VSS Monitoring provides a range of distributed traffic capture systems and taps from 10/100 to 10 GigE for complete, selectable and centralized visibility of networks, improving network analyzer reach and efficiency.
    • WANGuard Sniff is a software sniffer that provides centralized visibility of networks, including traffic accounting reports, traffic tops, IP graphs, traffic anomalies detection.
    • WildPackets Omni fault analysis platform for optimizing network services and improving uptime on enterprise networks.
  • Applications/Services/Systems monitoring (Hosted/managed monitoring services)
    • AccelOps integrated monitoring solution, which does security, performance, availability and change monitoring for data centers and cloud services.
    • Advanced HostMonitor is a system management tool that continuously monitors servers’ availability and performance. In the event of network errors, HostMonitor will alert the network administrator.
    • Alchemy Network Monitor monitors network servers: TCP/IP, ICMP, IPX/SPX, Oracle, MS SQL, NT EventLog, SQL query, HTTP URL, NT service state, maintains log file and sends notifications if the server goes down. Also marketed in Europe as Alchemy Eye.
    • AlertFox website and web application performance monitoring. Supports transaction monitoring of sites that use complex HTML, AJAX, Flash, Flex, and Silverlight. In-depth root cause analysis for trouble-shooting sporadic issues.
    • AppQos Live! from iTrinergy provides rapid answers in identifying, in real time, the causes of poor application and network performance problems.
    • Aqualogic Monitoring System helps you to monitor your mission critical applications without installing any agents/software on the production or pre-production environments. AMS lets you to configure the frequency of the monitoring attributes to as low as 15 seconds, which results in real-time monitoring.
    • Argent Argent has three products – The Argent Guardian, a real-time monitoring and alerting system for NT/2000 servers as well as SNMP-compliant devices; The Argent Predictor, a trend-analysis product for both NT/2000 servers and SNMP devices; and The Argent Sentinel, a web monitoring product.
    • Automate Enables a wide range of automation imperatives encompassing data aggregation, application integration, system/application/network monitoring and problem resolution, disaster recovery, file/data backup etc.
    • BBMonitor Windows bandwidth test software to monitor bandwidth usage and speeds. LAN and Internet bandwidth meter.
    • Catchpoint provides web performance monitoring services relying on synthetic agents on multiple locations around the world and JavaScript based performance monitoring of actual end users.
    • Chariot evaluates the performance of networked applications, performs stress tests of network devices and predicts networked application performance prior to deployment.
    • CleverEye provides an availability monitoring software for servers, network appliances, databases and applications.
    • Congruity Inspector collects and presents network LAN-WAN traffic as hyperlinked relationships. View systems, ports, protocols, applications, and content in a relational context so you can understand how each affects everything else. In 3 clicks, Inspector quickly identifies issues associated with slow network, WAN problems, poor application response, connectivity, access control and security.
    • CueVision Windows based tool to monitor website, servers and network devices.
    • DotCom-Monitor is an External Web Monitoring Service that brings together Monitoring, Reporting, Notification, Escalation and Analysis for HTTP, HTTPS, SMTP, POP3, DNS, FTP, ICMP and SOAP applications.
    • Edoceo provides network and application monitoring services, built with PHP on top of Nagios, pnp4Nagios and OpenVAS
    • egInnovations provide Enterprise Management Products with capabilities involving the ability to offer subscription based remote monitoring through a web browser console, real time monitoring and problem diagnosis and proactive alerts.
    • Express Metrix Network Inventory Software Hardware/software inventory and application usage metering tool for Windows-based network environments
    • ExtraHop Networks Application Performance Management system provides passive, real-time analysis from L2-L7 for proactive early warning and accelerated troubleshooting across network, web, database, and storage tiers, spanning physical and virtual environments. It combines the advanced troubleshooting capabilities of Network Performance Managers with the superior application-level visibility of User Experience Monitors.
    • Eye-on Bandwidth is a bandwidth monitor designed for scalability, speed and security . It has multiple user levels with different privilegies, and is managed by a web interface.
    • EZ-NOC provides a website monitoring tool using distributed servers around the world. It also includes network monitoring tools like: DNS, EMAIL, WEBSITE, SSL, ISP Speed Test, What Is My IP and Whois.
    • Ganymede provides performance management for clients,servers, applications, and the network as an integrated system.
    • Gomez provides diagnostic website and web application monitoring services from 12,000+ global testing locations that help companies to measure end-user web performance and troubleshoot application performance problems.
    • Hosted/Managed Monitoring Services
      • Alaloop provides through a managed service/SaaS mode (internet or intranet) ready to use dashboards to monitoring networks and housing SLA as well as application peformances(QoS and QoE)
      • Alertra Checks (http, https, ping, SMTP, POP3, IMAP4, FTP, TCP) web server from multiple stations around the world.
      • iGLASS Network Monitoring Services monitors your network’s performance by providing 24/7 NOC monitoring services for your network, servers and critical applications.
      • GMS Live Expert blends traditional IT Help Desk, with remote management software to ensure Reseller Partners, and their end customers have one vendor responsible for services and remote management.
      • LogicMonitor is a SaaS-based automated monitoring tool that monitors networks, servers, virtual environments, applications, and storage from a single pane.
      • monitis provides a “24 x 7” website, applications, systems, network and web traffic monitoring service helping users quickly identify faults and deficiencies to ensure continuous operations of their IT infrastructure and maintain business operations that provide the ultimate web experience. Particularly Monitis provides personalized Ajax dashboard interface, checks server performance and availability, generates uptime reports, tracks visitors, checks CPU, memory and other systems resources, and alerts its users in case abnormalities are detected. External end-user checks are performed from geographically dispersed servers as well from customer locations. Internal checks can be performed inside of network firewalls through smart agents.
      • Praetorian Guard is a Hybrid SaaS solution for network and user monitoring, notification and real-time reporting through a Windows GUI. It can inventory installed software and hardware, monitor event logs, user activity and overall computer performance. It is designed to support both centralized administration and distributed management.
      • pingwy Monitoring monitors remotely services like http,https,ftp,dns,telnet,ssh,pop,imap,smtp and alerts you by mail and SMAS when the service goes down by mail. It also allows you to have a precise view of your server’s access and load times upon different periods.
      • SecureMyCompany provides hosted, On Demand network and systems management software for a low monthly fee. Solutions include SNMP, WMI, Event Log and many more monitoring features.
      • SiteMonitor is a website uptime and measurement tools that verifies the performance of non-transactional websites up to every minute from 25 points of presence around the world.
      • Speed Test is a meter that monitors your internet connection, web site, cpu, memory, Hard Drives, Wifi, LAN, Processes and much more all in real time and will store all data recorded into an log, so it can be easily imported into almost any application. This data can be used to help in resolving problems with your internet connection or computer. Speed Test allows you to view the data in many ways.
      • TelcoAlert is a hosted solution that monitors and notifies for testing fax systems and circuits.
      • Visual Performance Manager provides enterprise service intelligence to help organizations deliver business services.
      • WatchMouse offers professional remote server monitoring services from 16 locations worldwide: http, https, ftp, pop, imap, dns, etc. Alerting by email, SMS, IM, and pager. Extensive reporting, also useful for SLA monitoring.
    • Heroix Longitude web-based, agentless application monitoring tool.
    • ICmynet.DNS is a free web service for testing the health of DNS domains and DNS servers. More than 30 tests in less than a minute, visualization of DNS errors and server availability.
    • Integrien features centralized, agentless monitoring of web and data base servers/applications. Used to be SiteAlive from CreationPoint.
    • IPCheck Server Monitor Network Up-/Downtime Monitoring Monitors critical network resources and detects system failures or performance problems. Freeware available.
    • ACE Live (formerly Network Physics NetSensory) as of Nov ’07) passively monitors network traffic providing utilization by protocol, application, host groups as well as topology, re-try and response time information. Good for real-time monitoring and trouble-shooting, also provides alerts and export of reports to web accessible pages.
    • GFI Network Server Monitor Monitors your network & servers for failures and fixes them automatically. Checks Exchange Server, SQL, Oracle, HTTP/FTP, Disk health & space, event logs
    • IMMonitor, is network monitoring software that can monitor chat content, email content and web surfing activities in your network.
    • internetVista remotely monitors web sites and Internet services for availability (http, https, smtp, ftp, nntp, tcp). Notifications sent via email and SMS. Monitoring centres in United States and Europe
    • Labtech Software includes the following features: Remote Monitoring, Software & Hardware Auditing, Remote Control, Software Deployment, Scripting, Automation, Auto-fixing Software Update, Ticketing, and timekeeping.
    • MonitorIT monitors, detects, alerts, diagnoses, measures, collects and reports on Windows Servers/Workstations, SNMP & SYSLOG Devices
    • mon.it.us is a free web-based service that grants you a suite of tools for monitoring performance, availability, and traffic statistics. You can establish your website’s response time and set up alerts for when a service becomes unavailable. You can also set-up weekly, automated benchmarks to see if changes you.ve made impact speed and performance either positively or negatively.
    • MonitorMagic – Server & Network Monitoring is a proactive monitoring/alerting tool for Windows 2003, 2000 and NT servers, workstations and SNMP devices.
    • N-able OnDemand MonITor Online provides 24×7 proactive network monitoring through status, notification and performance reporting without any network reconfiguration.
    • N-central is an IT governance platform for the mid-enterprise that manages information technology and security services from a business perspective.
    • NetMon hardware box that monitors network/service components including: routers; firewalls; file, web, dhcp, dns, syslog servers. Also provides protocol usage, bandwidth utilization, top web users and destinations, latency, up/down time, TCP/IP services.
    • NetStatus workgroup level monitoring application designed to be used in situations where you need to monitor anywhere from 1 to 50 servers or devices on a network.
    • NetVizor provides network monitoring and surveillance software to track workstations and individual users that may use multiple PC’s on a network.
    • NetworksA-OK appliance, provides end to end monitoring of your network and applications (web, email, database) performance and security.
    • NimTech provides NIME an end-to-end TCPIP performance characterization tool based on a client/server architecture. It allows launching various network tests from & between any location to quantify in real-time the performance of a TCPIP network between two endpoints hosts.
    • NPS Network Performance Services provides network, system, application, and security monitoring products and services via a 7×24 Network Operations Center. All products and services include automated and customized alerting, and web based performance reporting.
    • OPNET Panorama continuously monitors thousands of system and application metrics within each server, across all tiers, and automatically spots performance anomalies with advanced deviation tracking.
    • Orion Applications Performance Monitor brings monitoring, alerting, and reporting capabilities to applications and servers. Discover your applications and get the visibility you need into application performance and the underlying operating systems and servers they run on.
    • Overseer Network Monitor is a W2K network monitor providing easy installation, Microsoft Management Console configuration, and runs as a service to provide rock-solid reliability. Monitors websites, network devices, servers, services, and notifies administrators via Email, pager, cell phone, or net send.
    • PagerEnterprise is an automatic system, server and network monitor and notify remote system and network managers when important events occur. It runs on Windows NT/2000 to monitor servers, logfiles, services, SNMP Mibs, routers, TCP/IP, SNMP, disks, programs, web pages, devices, power, and more across Windows NT/2000, Novell NetWare, UNIX, OpenVMS, HP3000, AS/400, IBM, Linux and others.
    • PRTG Traffic Grapher Windows software to monitor bandwidth usage and other network parameters via SNMP. Freeware also available.
    • RSP is a cross-platform, agent-based network/server monitoring, analysis, & hardware tracking program with a web interface and an API for plugins.
    • Server Nanny Network Monitor monitors servers and network devices, sends problem notifications, performs actions, and logs performance data.
    • Server Supervisor monitors the availability and performance of various network resources. The program applies resource-specific approach to handle all cases from regular local workstations to complex web and database servers. It can be used by several people simultaneously. They can use a web interface to configure monitors and receive custom alert notifications depending on their roles. The program comes with built-in statistics analysis tool.
    • ServicePATH from Trendium provides plug-and-play service intelligence system that can collect and synthesize data from networks, applications / business processes and OSS. This synthesized data model is then used to assess and assure service delivery in real-time. The system identifies anomalies as they occur, pinpointing their cause and analyzing their effects on services and the business. It can also automatically initiate corrective action.
    • SimpleServerMonitor is an easy to use network server monitoring tool. It supports Ping, HTTP/HTTPS, FTP/FTPS, SMTP/SMTPS, POP3/POP3S, IMAP/IMAPS, and Custom monitors (supports SSL/TLS).
    • SLA Commander integrates with ACE (also from OPNET) to proactively capture traces of problematic transactions.
    • SuperAgent Monitors all TCP application packets as they travel from the network through the data center and out again, providing a way to measure network round trip time, server response time, data transfer time.
    • uptime software IT Systems Management that monitors, measures and manages across locations (multiple datacenters) environments (physical and virtual), platforms (Windows, Linux, Soalris, AIX, VMware, Novell, HP/UX, etc), applications, and networks.
    • Vigilix event detection and notification software for applications.
    • WatchTower system monitoring and management software application that runs within a Web-based portal environment.
  • Big Brother and its clone Big Sister consists of local clients that test system conditions and the availability of network services, and send these status reports to one or more DISPLAY servers where these reports appear as little dots on a web page, or PAGER servers that notify administrators about system problems.
  • DUMeter is a Windows tool to provide a visualization of the data that is flowing through your computer’s network connection. It includes includes a reporting facility, a notifications and events system
  • DSLReports provide measurement reports (e.g. speed tests, security scans, loss).
  • elkMonitor monitors your sites around the clock from servers across the globe, elkMonitor will alert you to signs of trouble.
  • Emulators
    • Anue Network Emulators are used to generate network latency, delay variation (jitter), packet errors, bit errors and other network impairments in order to test application performance over a WAN prior to deployment.
    • BreakingPoint provides testing tools for application, performance, and security of content-aware network devices.
    • PacketStorm IP Network Emulators reproduce the unfavorable conditions of IP Networks and WANs in a controllable and repeatable lab setting.
    • Shunra develops testing and evaluation tools for internet and intranet based network technologies and products.
  • Engineer’s Toolkit is a bundle of 49 networking tools that monitors and alerts on availability, bandwidth utilization, and health for hundreds of network devices, provides network diagnostics for troubleshooting and resolving complex network, offers an array of network discovery tools that facilitate IP address management, port mapping and ping sweeps, and eases management of Cisco® devices with tools for real-time NetFlow analysis, configuration management and router management.
  • Flow MonitoringACE Live Netflow
       module uses integrated web-based dashboards to provide a business-centric view of network utilization and application performance to prioritize problem resolution and effectively manage SLAs.

    • Aurora Network Traffic Analysis and Evaluation from IBM.
    • Caligare Flow Inspector from Caligare is a Netflow monitor and analyzer with many graph statistics, low level searching, application recognizer and utilization maps. Available in the US as NetIMonitor through Caligare partner Net US.
    • FlowMon is a NetFlow monitoring solution (IP flows), providing wire speed processing with no packet loss, for all types of networks from 10Mbps to 10 Gbps.
    • ICmy.NetFlow analyzer is an application for deep network traffic investigation, analysis and reporting. It is based on NetFlow statistics, exported from your routers and switches to ICmy.NetFlow server. Highlights: Web based Windows and Linux application,Cisco NetFlow 5 and 9 support (or equivalent: j-Flow, NetStream etc.),Flow statistics based on IP subnets, Hosts, Applications, Protocols, QoS, AS numbers.
    • InMon provides traffic flow monitoring tools for high-speed switches. The software is able to monitor tens of thousands of switch ports continuously, producing real-time top flows charts, and site-wide application-level traffic matrices.
    • Intermapper Flows from Dartware is a NetFlow and SFlow collector and analyzer that lets you see exactly where traffic comes from, who’s sending it, and what it’s used for. Runs on Windows, MacOS X, Linux, and Unix.
    • NetDetector from Nicksun a non-intrusive network security monitoring product that (when deployed as part of your data communications infrastructure) inspects traffic flows, detects the activities of intruders, sets alarms, makes continuous copies of data from the network, and analyzes every packet in the network in real-time at production network traffic rates.
    • Netflow from Cisco.
    • Netflow Analyzer is a product specifically meant for Traffic Analysis and Network Forensics, therefore, gives an in-depth visibility into the network traffic, bandwidth utilization, top talkers in the network etc from various flows, such as, NetFlow, sFlow, jFlow, IPFIX, Netstream etc. NetFlow Analyzer also has partnership with Cisco and 3COM.
    • NetFlowAuditor profiles flow data to help organizations quickly identify and alert on network anomalies to help resolve performance problems and manage network security and compliance across business services and applications. Highly fault tolerant, scalable and granular. Learns intensive network profiles with real-time, trending, multiviews, scheduled reporting and alerting. ipv6 compliant. Supports Cisco NetFlow v5/7/9, IPFIX, sFlow, jFlow, NetStream and Flexible NetFlow on Linux and Windows.
    • Netflow TRacker integrates with Visual Performance Manager and uses NetFlow data collected from the routers already deployed throughout your infrastructure.
    • NetQoS uses NetFlow to identify when and where problems are occurring or occurred, identify viruses using real time reporting, remove unwanted traffic instead of unnecessarily upgrading links, view and plan the impact of applications on the network over time.
    • NetIntercept is delivered as a complete system, with hardware and software pre-installed, and captures in real-time and provides later on demand batch analysis of the data.
    • Nexvu Analyzer analyze, classify 3000+ applications and protocols and report 35 metrics related to health, utilization and performance at line speed. It is an application aware network performance monitoring tool with JAVA GUI and full SNMP capabilities. Nexvu also has packet capture and analysis engine and can work as a netflow director. It is available as a software / real appliance and as VMware virtual appliance
    • Orion Netflow Traffic Analyzer enables you to quantify exactly how your network is being used, by whom, and for what purpose. Find the bottlenecks, and shut down the bandwidth hogs.
    • Packeteer provides network traffic characterization, using signatures derived from network layers up through 7, it can then use this information to do TCP rate control (using CoS/ToS. DiffServ & MPLS) to ensure timely performance.
    • PRTG Traffic Grapher Windows software to monitor bandwidth usage and other network parameters via SNMP. Supports Netflow. Freeware also available.
    • Scrutinizer NetFlow & sFlow Analyzer NetFlow and sFlow Analyzer provides detailed network utilization information for the users and applications causing the most traffic using a variety of flow-based technologies.
    • SevOne Dedicated NetFlow Collector (SevOne DNC) is a dedicated appliance for organizations with heavy NetFlow reporting, analysis and troubleshooting requirements, providing in-depth data about traffic flows in terms of applications, protocols and hosts and their impact on the network.
    • sFlow probe from InMon is a monitor/SPAN port probe capable of continuously monitoring application level traffic flows at a full 1Gigabit (over 1,500,000 million packets per second).
    • StealthWatch provides flow-based network performance and security monitoring for enterprise networks.
    • WANGuard Flow is a NetFlow analyzer that provides centralized visibility of networks, including traffic acccounting reports, tops, IP and ASN graphs, traffic anomalies detection.
  • FTP
    • FastCopy provides reliable, secure, bandwidth controlled, automated, enhanced file transfer.
    • Trellian Trellian FTP is a file transfer client that allows you to transfer files between your PC and any FTP server on the Internet.
    • WS_FTP for windows provides a fast and easy way to move files securely (with SSL) over the Internet. there is a client and server
  • HipLink is a one or two-way wireless data and messaging solution that enables software used for network monitoring, field force automation, email, customer support, help desk, to communicate with data enabled wireless devices, including digital cellular phones, PDAs, one-way and two-way pagers.
  • Holistix Web Manager is software installed inside the firewall that monitors and manages all web system components including web servers, databases, urls, applications, etc. Holistix also has a service, called Remote Monitor, that Measures your site’s performance 24 hours a day from monitoring locations around the world.
  • Internet Control Panel performs checks every five to ten minutes on the availability, performance and content of your website. It also checks other important internet services you depend on; email, file transfer and authorization processes.
  • IP Address/Asset Management
    • Inventory Genie is a Discovery based Inventory system, that can automatically build an inventory on any subject (specially network & system inventories ) using simple wizards, parsers and multiple protocols (icmp,snmp,sql,http,telnet, ssh,wmi,registry,open ports,…). It can be used to populates CMDBs. It has many pre-made discovery rules. It has the ability to perform remote actions on selected elements based on the information in its DB, thus enables provisioning.
    • PC Inventory Advisor automatically queries all computers on your network and reports back with details about OS and hotfixes, installed software and hardware, network alerts and visual comparison of configurations.
    • Remote Asset Tracker is a network inventory and PC auditing software designed specifically for medium and large companies.
    • Total Network Inventory is a PC audit and Network inventory software for office and large scale enterprise networks. Total Network Inventory interrogates all computers and notebooks on a network and reports back with complete information about OS, service packs, hotfixes, hardware, software, running processes, etc. on remote machines. This information is added to the centralized database and network administrators are able to generate reports about each or all PCs (notebooks) on a network. The program is agent-free and requires no software installed on remote machines (laptops).
  • ISDNwatch is an ISDN network management suite for your ISDN routers.
  • IT Search
    • Paglo discovers everything IT and allows users to search and monitor their server, network, user, and configuration information. The Paglo Crawler is open source and it is free to get started with the service.
    • Splunk allows you to search and navigate IT data from applications, servers and network devices in real-time. It includes logs, configurations, messages, traps and alerts, scripts, code, and metrics
  • Keynote Systems is a supplier of software and services for measuring and managing the responsiveness of web-based applications. KeyNote RedAlert is aWeb site monitoring service that can perform end-to-end checks of your a site every 5 or 15 minutes. It can also monitor DNS, email, news & telnet servers.
  • MeterWare for Windows 95/NT & UNIX from Technically Elite.
  • Metrica Network Performance Reporting (NPR) is a performance monitoring toolset being used by telecoms operators to manage the quality of service and the capacity of their networks.
  • NATManager.
  • NEPM (Network Equipment Performance Monitor is a two part software system that captures and analyzes logged performance data from IP networked equipment and reports it via e-mail and web pages. It can be hosted on either a Unix or WinNT system or a combination of these.
  • Network Security Monitoring Tools
    • GFI LANguard network vulnerability scanning, patch management and auditing solution.
    • Lan-Secure Security Center: Network security monitoring software that provides real-time intrusion detection and prevention by enforcing network policy organization rules and online network users activity management.
    • Net Detective iPhone application Using low level techniques common to NMap and other powerful network auditing tools, NetDetective will expose open TCP ports, UDP ports, and UPnP/Bonjour services running on your network.
    • Network Enforcer Network security software that monitors user behaviors using security filters.
    • Nsauditor is a network security scanner that allows to audit and monitor network for possible vulnerabilities,checks methods that a hacker might use to attack it. Over 45 network tools for monitoring, scanning, sniffing, enumerating and gaining access to machines (access to secured shares and confidential files, also detects and logs network access to shared folders).
    • QRadar isolates the source and identifies corrective measures for dangers hiding in daily network activity.
    • Sentinel analyzes an up-to-date model of the production network to perform automated and systematic configuration audits and diagnose device misconfigurations, policy violations, inefficiencies, and security breaches.
    • System Shepherd delivers end-to-end application visibility (from end-user experience to network to application internals). It is provided as a software service that can optionally be coupled with managed services. The level of optional management is flexible. It can range from Managed Alerting to multi-dimensional SLA-based application management.
    • Techout helps companies measure and optimize the speed and availability of critical online applications, from establishing performance objectives to maintaining peak performance, Techout helps companies measure and optimize the speed and availability of critical online applications.
    • WFilter is an Internet filtering software that can help organizations to monitor and manage all Internet behaviors on their networks. You only need to install WFilter in one computer to monitor your whole network.
    • ZoneRanger from Tavve is a secure network management proxy appliance for the DMZ; it proxies SNMP GET/SET, SNMP Traps, syslog, NetFlow, sFlow, IP status, and TCP port status, delivering the proxied traffic to a network management platform or tool.
  • Network Tools has a suite of online IP and DNS tools that can be run both locally and remotely to check for any Network Errors.
  • Net-One-1, monitors your company’s network devices 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
  • NetOps provides a set of tools for monitoring, logging and reporting network status, focussing on preventive maintenance.
  • NetReality provides monitoring and QoS shaping on all OSI layers, from 1 – 7 on WAN links. Real-time and historical reports are provided.
  • NetScout Drawing on information generated by NetScout’s application-aware probes, intelligent active agents and data collected directly from network devices strategically placed throughout the WAN, SAN, and LAN, the nGenius Performance Management System monitors, troubleshoots, performs capacity planning and reports on the application traffic flowing across the network.
  • NextPointS3 provides the ability t define, measure, baseline and report on service levels at many levels from the core network to end user applications.
  • PingGraph is a multi-threaded graphical TCP/IP network monitoring and diagnostic tool for Windows 95 and NT.
  • ResponseNetworks provides tools for network service level monitoring and measurements.
  • SAA Service Assurance Agent built into Cisco IOS release 12.0(5)T allows measuring response time, net resources, availability, jitter, connect time, packet loss and application performance.
  • SftpDrive Maps any SSH server as a Windows network drive. Provides transparent and secure integration of the remote filesystem into Windows without requiring additional server software or configuration.
  • Silverback’s InfoCare delivers real-time and historical information on faults, assets, performance and security across networks, systems and applications through a unified Web-based interface.
  • SNMP Tools:
    • AdventNet SNMP API can be used to build system management, application management and network management applications and applets. It includes class libraries and Java beans for Java SNMP development, as well as a complete MibBrowser for interacting with SNMP enabled devices. The AdventNet Agent Toolkit Java Edition provides a complete GUI-based development environment to build standalone SNMP agents, Multi-Protocol agents, and standalone TL1 agents. Also see AdventNet ManageEngine JMX Studio a 100% Java-based development environment that provides Java, J2EE, and EAI middleware application developers, the ability to build JMX and SNMP-based manageability for their applications. It also comes with options for other protocol adaptors like HTML, RMI, CORBA, SOAP, and AMI adaptor for plugging into different types of management consoles.
    • Denika Performance Trender is a trending tool that collects and graphs SNMP details for interface utilization, CPU, Memory, Disk Space, Frame Relay, Database Resources, QoS, Port Errors etc.
    • LoriotPro a generic SNMP manager
    • MIW Multiple Interface Watcher is a graph utility that shows the utilisation of up to 20 different interfaces. The data is requested from the devices using SNMP. MIW is an advanced development of Interface Traffic Indicator that focuses more on the utilization overview of many interfaces than on much information of one interface.
    • OidView is a modular network management analysis tool that uses the SNMP protocol to talk to various agents and devices on a computer network, offering a variety of plug-in modules like a MIB Browser, MIB Manager, Trap Manager, PDU Capture, etc.
    • NetVoyant Provides SNMP-based performance metrics for managing network infrastructure, devices, and services
    • Open NerveCenter is a network management platform, based on SNMP, that is extensible using PERL. NerveCenter correlates events in real time from network and security devices, UNIX and NT systems and applications to improve availability, performance and security.
    • OPENXTRA has a set of SNMP utilities.
    • SNMP Explorer provides a tree view of your SNMP managable devices, provides a way to talk to or from the devices, provides a flexible log of transactions, and permits you to transact with the devices with simple yet powerful scripts.
    • SNMP Informant is installed on Windows hosts to enable them to provide SNMP information.
    • SNMP Research
    • SNMP Sweep Engineer’s Toolset queries an IP address range to determine which IP addresses are used and which are unused.
    • TrapBlaster SNMP trap management engine that receives, filters and converts SNMP traps. They may then be forwarded to your network management applications.
    • Unbrowse SNMP. A visual SNMP MIB browser, compiler, walker.
    • XRate1 SNMP based network monitoring with statistical tags and OPC Server available.
  • StatScope from IP Sciences is an outsourced service providing a customized IP network monitoring and reporting capability.
  • TelAlert from CalAmp a package for enunciating alerts and managing via pagers, email, pop up windows etc.
  • Third Watch Server Monitor will allow you to monitor all of your critical servers and services on an IP network and be notified of any changes in their status. It is a server monitoring program using TCP/IP. It can monitor via Ping, HTTP, FTP or any other TCP/IP port.
  • Topology/Traceroute based tools
    • EdgeScape from Akamai, maps user IP addresses to their geographic and network point of origin. This information is assembled into a vast knowledge base and made available to Edgescape customers.
    • GeoBoy Allows you to view traces on a flat map or 3D globe. Incorporate geographical features such as cities, rivers, and political boundaries. Zoom in on areas of interest. Save and restore trace data. Rotate and manipulate maps. Update and customize geographical location cache files.
    • NeoTrace provides graphical traceroute information.
    • PingPlotter is an enhanced traceroute program for Windows 95/98/NT/W2K/XP.
    • Route Explorer provides visibility, analysis and diagnosis of IP networks from a routing point of view
    • SMARTHawk from Solana Networks is an IP network monitoring and diagnostics tool focused on topology, routing and qos
    • VisualRoute a GUI based traceroute for Windows.
  • Triticom has software based network protocol analyzers, LAN traffic monitors, RMON probes, and an SNMP manager.
  • View2000 runs under Windows NT and has the ability to monitor multi-vendor network equipment configurations, using flat file databases for speed and Oracle RDBMS for SQL report queries, and NOT using SNMP.
  • Viola Networks provides NetAlly and other tools that include a suite of tests to provide “true” Service Level Management (SLM), the ability to audit policies and Quality of Service (QoS), and automatically conduct preventive maintenance tests to discover hidden problems in the network.
  • VisualPulse from DataMetrics provide realtime and historical reports on RTT & loss.
  • VoIP (Voice over IP)
    • ACE Live VoIP Monitoring module supplies real-time and historical data in a business context including both application performance and call quality.
    • AppNeta Uses standard protocols (ICMP and/or UDP) to transmit small packet configurations across the actual path the application takes. These packets vary in size, pattern, and spacing to fully characterize the network path. Detects signatures used to identify the likely cause of the problem, including MTU mismatch, QoS mismatch, duplex mismatch, media errors, path congestion, excessive packet reordering, etc.
    • Nectar Services Converged Management Platform (CMP) provides comprehensive VoIP monitoring and management solutions including QoS Voice Quality Management, tailored for Avaya and Cisco Unified Communications and Contact Centers.
    • NetQuest from Tekno Telecom non-intrusively monitors converged wireline, wireless and next-generation networks (including SS7, SIP, Sigtran, H.248, IMS, 4G and LTE) deriving business intelligence and generating network call/session detail records for Troubleshooting, Call Trace, Protocol Analysis, Quality of Service, Inter-Carrier Billing, Fraud Prevention, Revenue Assurance, Roamer Analysis, Surveillance, Billing Verification, and Alarming.
    • netrounds is a cloud-based solution using distributed active measurement probes which are easily downloaded and deployed on PC hardware. It supports concurrent monitoring of SIP signalling perfomance and ongoing call quality, as well as live IPTV MPEG monitoring in combination of flexible TCP/UDP traffic generation up to 10 Gbit/s.
    • NetQoS VoIP Monitor Network-based call setup and call quality monitoring product that tracks the call quality users experience, provides alerts on call performance problems, and isolates performance issues to speed troubleshooting and MTTR.
    • Orion VOIP Monitor proactively analyze VoIP quality across WAN links, as well as monitor the underlying systems and protocols that the VoIP environment relies upon.
    • Prognosis provides systems management software for performance monitoring of IP telephony, VOIP, availability, network management, Windows, UNIX and Linux.
    • SevOne VoIP Telephony Monitoring, enables organizations to monitor the quality of experience for their VoIP applications from the same system and web-based console that they use to manage their network performance and availability. All of the SevOne capabilities for polling, monitoring, alerting and reporting are available for VoIP call quality metrics.
    • Telchemy provides Voice over IP (VoIP) passive call quality monitoring and active Quality of Service (QoS) management. Designed specifically to be embedded into VoIP end-systems, management devices and DSPs, Telchemy’s non-intrusive monitoring technology, VQmonTM, is the only technology to model time-varying impairments and their effects on end-user-perceived quality in real-time.
    • ZTI provide LANTraffic V2 and IP Traffic Test & Measure software testing tools for automatic generation of TCP and UDP traffic.
  • Video over IP
    • CertUs Digital FaultLine (windows software) monitors, in real-time, ethernet MPEG-2 Transport Streams and provides QoE/QoS (ETSI TR 101 290) statistics for Video-over-IP, IPTV and VOD. A free unlimited use run-from-pcap version is also available.

Network Monitoring Software: Public Domain or Free Network Monitoring Tools

Application Monitoring | BGP | Finger Printing | Flow Monitoring | FTP | Host based network monitoring tools | IP Address management (IPAM) | Mapping | Monitoring Infrastructures | Network Security | Packet Capture/Analysis Tools | Path Characterization | Ping | RRDtool | SNMP | Throughput tools |Traceroute

  • ANL Web100 based Network Configuration Tester tests the reliablity and operational status of your network link.
  • Application Monitoring
    • Alvias provides free monitoring of HTTP, TCP/IP port, ping, SMTP, POP# FTP, web page defacements from multiple networks around the world.
    • H.323 Beacon is a tool that can be used to measure, qualify and troubleshoot performance of H.323 Videoconference sessions both at the network and host levels (end-to-end)
    • MossHe (Monitoring with SSH Environment) is a simple, lightweight (both in size and system requirements) server monitoring package designed for secure and in-depth monitoring of a handful of typical/critical internet systems.
    • Munin monitoring tool surveys all your computers and remembers what it saw. It presents all the information in graphs through a web interface. Its emphasis is on plug and play capabilities. After completing a installation a high number of monitoring plugins will be playing with no more effort.
    • OpenSMART (Open Source|System Monitoring and Reporting Tool) is a tool to monitor applications with an agent per host. These agents report all there results to a central monitoring console for displaying and alerting. OpenSMART agents can fix some errors (like not running processes) on their own and OpenSMART knows about conditional monitoring (e.g. in a cluster: An application will be monitored only, when the file system is available on this cluster node, too).
    • Serio IT Service View is a free monitoring tool for servers and network devices. It includes standard plugins for monitoring Windows Servers, Linux Servers, Exchange servers, ‘pingable’ devices, log files, Oracle databases, web and web page content monitoring. It can respond to SNMP Traps, and includes its own mib compiler and scripting language for creating your own plugins. WMI integration allows rebooting of Windows servers, restarting services, etc. Realtime graphs and web page status pages included.
    • SpiceWorks is a browser-based desktop that lets you: inventory hardware, software and patches on your network; monitor your network for new software, low disk space, offline servers and rogue users; report on the information you need to manage your network.
    • System and Network Monitor (SNM) is a tool to monitor, graph and alert on computing devices and services. SNM runs on a Windows or Linux device on your network, 24 hours every day. The recorded data is accessed via a user friendly menu-driven web browser, e-mail alerts are raised if a user determined threshold fails. Sysmon is a network monitoring tool designed to provide high performance and accurate network monitoring of various application protocols. Currently supported protocols include SMTP, IMAP, HTTP, TCP, UDP, NNTP, and PING tests.
    • XYMON (used to be HobbitMon) monitors hosts, network services, and anything else you configure it to do via extensions. Hobbit will periodically generate requests to network services – http, ftp, smtp and so on – and record if the service is responding as expected. Through the use of agents installed on the servers, you can also monitor local disk utilisation, logfiles and processes.
  • aslookup tool searches the sequence of AS number specified with the parameter from IRR and indicates the first line of Description of AS Object.
  • arpwatch, if this link fails then you can FTP it from ftp://ftp.ee.lbl.gov/arpwatch.tar.Z (since this is the master repository it may also be a more recent version than the one above).
  • BGP
    • Argus monitors the Internet and discovers anomaly BGP updates caused by prefix hacking and adverises via the web site. See also the paper and about argus.
    • BGPlay a web based service, freely available to the community since 2004, which allows graphical inspection of interdomain routing evolution using public BGP data collected by www.routeviews.org and by www.ris.ripe.net.
    • BGPmon can monitor your prefixes and alert you in case of a ‘interesting’ path change. Recently this has received quite some attention. Specifically after the Youtube hijack and the demo given at defcon.
    • Cyclops a watchdog for prefix hijack and the Border Gateway Protocol.
    • iBGPlay based on the same visualization technology of BGPlay it is designed to inspect the interdomain routing evolution using private BGP data collected from ISP’s routers. iBGPlay can show the outgoing traffic paths for all internet destinations and is especially suited for content providers. Subscription to iBGPlay is free.
    • LinkRank BGP dynamics visualization tool “LinkRank” also presented at Nanog 32 at Reston, VA (http://www.nanog.org/mtg-0410/lad.html).
  • FDBGet This little gadget will try to retrieve the forwarding table entries (Mac to interface number) of switches (layer 2 devices). This comes in handy when you want to know to which interface of a switch a particular NIC (e.g. computer) is attached to. Now suppports parameters for command line use.
  • Dig
  • D-ITG (Distributed Internet Traffic Generator) is a platform (collection of tools) capable of producing traffic (network, transport and application layer) and of accurately replicating appropriate stochastic processes for both IDT (Inter Departure Time) and PS (Packet Size) random variables (exponential, uniform, cauchy, normal, pareto, …).
  • Dummmynet A FreeBSD system for emulating the effects of bandwidth limitations, propagation delays, bounded-size queues, and packet losses.
  • FingerPrinting
    • NetworkActive Port Scanner a network scanning tool that can perform UDP and TCP port scans and subnet scans, whois, DNS-dig, ping, protocol scans, and TCP/IP stack fingerprinting.
    • Nmap is a utility for port scanning of large networks, although it works fine for single hosts. OPENXTRA has a version (NMapWin) for Windows.
    • TBIT TCP Behavior Inference Tool
    • sscan performs probes against victim hosts to identify services which may potentially be vulnerable to exploitation.
  • Flow Monitoring
    • Argus the network Audit Record Generation and Utilization System. The Argus Open Project is focused on developing network activity audit strategies that can do real work for the network architect, administrator and network user. It is a Unix based Real Time Flow Monitor designed to track and report on the status and performance of all network transactions seen in a data network traffic stream.
    • ASDIC is a system for advanced firewall log and traffic analysis in large TCP/IP networks.
    • Cflowd is an experimental tool to collect data from Cisco’s netflow export feature.
    • Nett::Flow is a Perl CPAN module to decode and encode NetFlow/IPFIX datagrams.
    • Netflow Monitor is tool with a nice web interface for processing and evaluating NetFlow Exports from CISCO routers.
    • NFDUMP tools collect and process netflow data on the command line. They are part of the NfSen project. The goal of the design is to able to analyze netflow data from the past as well as to track interesting traffic patterns continuously. The amount of time back in the past is limited only by the disk space available for all the netflow data. The tools are optimized for speed for efficient filtering. The filter rules look familiar to the syntax of tcpdump (pcap like).
    • NfSen A graphical web based front end for the nfdump netflow tools that allows you to: dDisplay your netflow data: Flows, Packets and Bytes using RRD (Round Robin Database); navigate through the netflow data; process the netflow data within the specified time span; create history as well as continuous profiles; set alerts, based on various conditions; write your own plugins to process netflow data on a regular interval.
    • Qosmet enables real-time passive QoS monitoring of IP application flows + also QoE evaluation for trained applications. Qosmet supports Windows, Linux, and Android and runs as a light-weight SW Service, being controllable from third party SW via a special protocol library.
  • FTP is the standard File Transfer Protocol. See also Commercial FTP tools.
    • Autobuf is an auto tuning-enabled FTP client and server. The client, a modification of the NcFTP Client, enables Auto Tuning to calculate optimal window sizes before files are transferred. The client is compatible with most other FTP servers. The server, a modification of the WuFtp FTP server, allows connecting clients to reset its buffer size dynamically by using a SITE option.
    • bbcp a secure peer to peer file copy program supporting large windows and multiple streams. See also the presentation and the PDF paper.
    • bbftp is designed to quickly transfer files across a wide area network. The package comprises of a server and clients. It also provides compression and secures the transmission of the username and password by using the cryptolib of the OpenSSL project.
    • BitTorrent an aggressive peer-to-peer file transfer protocol/implementation.
    • Firehose firehose uses multiple interfaces to stripe a bulk data transfer (it’s geared towards files, the home-grown protocol includes sending a filename and the client requires a file) over multiple network interfaces.
    • GSIFTP is an ftp client and server with built in kerberos and GSI (globus) security, and also allows you to set the TCP buffers on both the client and server.
    • HPN-SSH provides a patch to remove the performance bottlenecks in OpenSSH.
    • SafeTP operates by installing a transparent proxy in the Windows networking stack which detects outgoing FTP connections from any Windows FTP client, and silently secures them using modern cryptographic techniques.
    • NcFTP has a popular free FTP client that adds support for firewalls, intelligent ls caching, background and scheduled processing, and Microsoft Windows.
    • RFT Reliable File Transfer Service is a service that allows byte streams to be transferred in a reliable manner. Reliability, in this context, means that problems of less than a certain, user defined magnitude are dealt with automatically. i.e. problems like dropped connections, machine reboots, temporary network outages, etc are dealt with automatically (usually via retry) until they either resume or meet some “ultimate failure” condition
    • vsFTP Re-engineered ftpd server with modern security and performance integrated. Accounts easily isolated using integrated chroot() based configurations, significant reporting facilities, performs well under high loads.
    • WU-FTPD is a popular FTP server from Washington University.
  • Host based network monitoring tools
    • Collectl is a lightweight tool that can monitor network and other traffic and provide a consistent, integrated view of what the system is doing. It can run as a daemon, maintaining a set of rolling logs and optionally can write them in a format plottable by gnuplot or loadable into Excel.
    • Etherape is a graphical network monitor for Unix modeled after etherman. Featuring link layer, ip and TCP modes, it displays network activity graphically. Hosts and links change in size with traffic. Color coded protocols display.
    • Ethergrouik is a free opensource easy-to-use software that enables you to monitor your network activity (like Etherape) for Windows.
    • Fing is a freeware tool for the discovery and scan of local and remote networks. Using adapting techniques, it can discover and scan large networks in short times. It runs on Windows, Linux and Mac OS X.
    • IPTraf is a console-based network statistics utility for Linux. It gathers a variety of figures such as TCP connection packet and byte counts, interface statistics and activity indicators, TCP/UDP traffic breakdowns, and LAN station packet and byte counts.
    • Ntop is a Unix tool that shows the network usage, similar to the popular top Unix command.
    • PacketTrap is a free network monitoring tool suite including; TFTP, ping scan, traceroute, and port scan.
    • Pktstat a real-time list of active connections seen on a network interface, and how much bandwidth is being used by what. Partially decodes HTTP and FTP protocols to show what filename is being transferred. X11 application names are also shown. Entries hang around on the screen for a few seconds so you can see what just happened. Also accepts filter expressions á la tcpdump.
  • Internet Detective is a small Windows application that offers computer users easy access to the status and capabilities of their current network connection by providing information about advanced network capabilities, including connectivity to an Internet2 backbone network, an estimate of available bandwidth and multicast capabilities.
  • IP Address Management (IPAM)
    • NetDB is a Network Tracking Database providing a highly scalable program using SSH/telnet that keeps track of all ARP and mac-address tables across your routers and switches, with many features to ease network management. You can map devices to your switch ports, locate all ports configured for a VLAN and track all of this information over time.
    • Netdisco is an Open Source web-based network management tool. Designed for moderate to large networks, configuration information and connection data for network devices are retrieved by SNMP. With Netdisco you can locate the switch port of an end-user system by IP or MAC address. Data is stored using a SQL database for scalability and speed. It also provide optional use of the Cisco Discovery Protocol (CDP).
  • Lachesis a tool from Intel to monitor and report on response time and packet loss to “landmark” Internet sites.
  • Mapping tools
    • GeoPlot is a light-weight java applet which allows users to create a geographical image of a data set.
    • Mapnet from NLANR/CAIDA is a tool for visualizing the infrastructure of multiple backbone providers simultaneously (Mapnet), and for updating and correcting information that may be invalid or out of date (Mapnet Update)
    • NetGeo is a database and collection of Perl scripts used to map IP addresses, domain names and AS numbers to geographical locations.
    • Network Weathermap provides useful tools for reporting/visualisation of a network’s flows generally.
  • Monitoring Infrastructures (also see Comparison of Some Internet Active E2E Measurement Infrastructures)
    • Cheops is an Open Source Network User Interface designed to unify your network utilities.
    • EDDIE is a system monitoring, security and performance analysis agent developed entirely in Python. Its key features are portability, powerful configuration and ease of expansion.
    • GNMS is a GPL Network Management System, a graphical tool used to monitor state of network elements. Montoring can be done in multiple ways using service discovery, snmp, wmi and custom plugins, moreover syslog and snmp traps can be caught too.
    • Ganglia is a scalable distributed monitoring system for high-performance computing systems such as clusters and Grids.
    • GNetWatch is a mature free open source Java application that offers real-time graphical monitoring and analysis of network performance (using traffic generators and SNMP probes). The main advantage of GNetWatch is that it can monitor events (like throughput) that change for instance every second : the user can see a dynamic graphical window.
    • GroundWork Monitor Open Source combines open source projects like Nagios, Nmap, Sendpage, MySQL, etc with custom dashboards in one software package for monitoring a range of platforms – Linux, Unix, Windows – & network devices.
    • Hyperic HQ Open Source systems management software designed to monitor, analyze and control performance and availability of web infrastructure including hosts, virtualized guests, services, applications and networks through an easy to use portal and extensible plugin architecture.
    • Mon is a general-purpose resource monitoring system, which can be used to monitor network service availability, server problems, environmental conditions such as the temperature in a room, or any number of things.
    • Nagios (used to be NetSaint) is an open source host, service and network monitoring program. It is designed to run under Linux, although it should work under most other *NIX variants. It can run either as a normal process or as a daemon, intermittently running checks on various services that you specify. The actual service checks are performed by external “plugins” which return service information to Nagios. Several CGI programs are included with Nagios in order to allow you to view the current service status, history, etc. via a web browser.
    • NetMeter This application allows you to seamlessly monitor your online activity in terms of traffic speed. The main window of the program is minimalistic and contains a graph that shows the on-going traffic in your network. The download speed appears in red, while the upload speed appears in green. You can also view the maximum accepted speed.
    • Network Performance Advisor is a single application which integrates the measuring, analyzing, and displaying of network performance statistics.
    • Network Status Notifier is a tool for monitoring and logging network status (links,routes, addresses, neighbours…) and executing scripts upon state changes.
    • NIMI
    • Osmius is a system, application and service monitoring tool with availability and SLA tracking.
    • OSSMON is a web-based monitoring package based on OSSWEB application framework. It supports SNMP monitoring as well as specific services like POP3, SMTP, Ping.
    • Performance Co-Pilot from SGI allows one to measure, visualize, record, and/or respond to the status, activity, and performance of systems, networks, applications, and servers. PCP is open source and runs on Windows, Mac OS X, and most Unix/Linux variants.
    • PingER End-to-end active measurement using ping to monitor end-to-end performance of Internet links.
    • Polymon is a free Windows/SQL based network/system monitoring solution that has flexible alerting capabilities as well as historical analysis of uptime and all counters and monitor statuses for a variety of monitors such as ping, snmp, Windows performance monitors, SQL, etc.
    • SCAMPI SCAMPI is a platform for passive monitoring. It can use several different hardware monitoring adapters (SCAMPI adapters developed in the project, DAG cards produced by Endace and regular NIC cards). It provides MAPI (Monitoring API) as a high-level abstraction of passive monitoring for easy creation of portable monitoring applications.
    • Scriptroute is a flexible network measurement and debugging system. Measurements are expressed as scripts that run as an ordinary user, and a priviledged daemon schedules and manages the packet exchange. The goal is to allow any user to connect to any server and execute any safe network measurement.
    • Simple Infrastructure Capacity Monitor (SICMD) is a tool to monitor, graph and alert the capacity of computing devices. SICM runs on a Windows or Linux device on your network, 24 hours every day. The recorded data is accessed via a user friendly menu-driven web browser. E-mail alerts are raised if a user determined number of queries fail.
    • skipole-monitor allows the user to input host IP addresses, it then pings these hosts every five minutes and displays their status via a built-in web server, on port 8000. It can optionally send email alerts if the hosts change status.
    • Total Network Monitor is an application which can be installed on a server and runs 24/7, constantly monitoring your network computers, servers, ports and services and alerting administrators about arising problems by e-mail, jabber, ICQ etc.
    • Zenoss is an integrated, easy-to-use IT infrastructure monitoring software product produced by the Open Source Community.
  • mrtg Multi Router Traffic Grapher. Also available from OPENXTRA.
  • mrtg-ping-probe is a ping probe for MRTG. It is used to monitor the round trip time and packet loss to networked devices. MRTG uses its output to generate graphs visualizing minimum and maximum round trip times or packet loss.
  • NetLogger tools to make it easy to instrument distributed applications and visualize the results.
  • Network Security
    • CERT NetSA Security Suite The Network Situational Awareness (NetSA) group at CERT has developed and maintains a suite of open source tools for monitoring large-scale networks using flow data. These tools have grown out of the work of the AirCERT project, the SiLK project and the effort to integrate this work into a unified, standards-compliant flow collection and analysis platform.
  • netstat a built in Unix and Windows command line utility to display active network connections.
  • NetStat Live is a small, easy to use TCP/IP protocol monitor which can be used to see your exact throughput on both incoming and outgoing data.
  • NetTest Nettest is a secure, real-time network monitoring utility. The nettest framework is designed to incorporate existing and new network tests, and be run as a daemon or an interactive process. Requests for network tests are received via a SSL connection or the user interface and are authorized using an ACL list (in the future authorization using Akenti will also be supported).
  • Network Diagnostic Tool (NDT) a web100 Java applet developed to test the reliablity and operational status of your desktop computer and network connection.
  • NPAD (Network Path and Application Diagnosis) is designed to diagnose network performance problems in your end-system (the machine your browser is running on) or the network between it and your nearest NPAD server. For each diagnosed problem, the server prescribes corrective actions with instructions suitable for non-experts.
  • ns network simulator is a discrete event simulator targeted at networking research.
  • NIST Net allows a single Linux PC set up as a router to emulate a wide variety of network conditions.
  • NOCOL
  • nslookup
  • OWAMP One Way Active Measurement Program from Internet 2. provides one way delay measurements.
  • Packet capture/analysis tools. (see also commercial capture toolsBefore using these tools on your site you should check with your network security people.
    • Analyzer is a fully configurable analyzer program. It was developed in Win32 environment. It can be used with both Windows 95/98 and Windows NT/2000 platforms. It is composed by three parts: a graphical interface, an analysis engine and a capture program.
    • Bro intrusion detection system contains a number of protocol analyzers that can munch on tcpdump traces (or live traffic, of course) and extract high-level application events from the reassembled TCP/UDP streams.
    • Crypto-PAn is a cyrptography-based sanitization tool for network trace owners to anonymize the IP addresses in their traces in a prefix-preserving manner.
    • Ethereal/Wireshark is a free network protocol analyzer for Unix and Windows (including Win2K). It allows you to examine data from live network or from a capture file on disk. Also Packetyzer provides a Packetyzer new Windows User Interface that will available under the terms of the GNU Public License. Also see the CACE Pilot that provides extra facilities to Wireshark.
    • Darkstat a packet sniffer that runs as a background process on a cable/DSL router, gathers all sorts of statistics about network usage, and serves them over HTTP.
    • IPAudit captures packets in promiscuous mode and is often used for intrusions detection.
    • Jnettop Jnettop is a traffic visualiser, which captures traffic going through the host it is running from and displays streams sorted by bandwidth they use.
    • Justsniffer is a tcp packet sniffer. It captures reassembles and reorders TCP packets, performs IP packet defragmentation and displays the tcp flow and trace timings. It is useful for logging network traffic in a ‘standard’ (web server like) or in a customized way. It can log http response time, useful for tracking network services performances (e.g. web server, application server, etc.) .
    • Microsoft Network Monitor is a free protocol analyzer for Windows. It lets you capture and view live network data and view traces in .CAP, .PCAP, and .ETL file formats. It is capable of analyzing hundreds of protocols including Windows and SQL protocols as described from MSDN. Parsers are updated regularly in the open source on CodePlex. There are also a variety of open source analysis add-ons. More information can be found at the tool’s blog.
    • NetworkMiner is a passive network sniffer/packet capturing tool for Windows. NetworkMiner can detect OS’s, hostnames, open ports, sessions and extract files without putting traffic on the network. NetworkMiner can also parse PCAP files for offline forensic analysis
    • PasTmon is a passive network application response time monitor utilising packet capture (via libpcap), tracking sessions maintaining transaction state and collecting metrics of server/network response times, segment size negotiation and TCP window size advertisements.
    • Plab is a software platform for packet capture and analysis. It is capable to extract, either from live traffic or from file traces, Inter Packet Times (IPT) and Packet Sizes (PS) inside conversations between couples of hosts. Plab runs under Linux and FreeBSD. It tries to use as few processing resources as possible and it is capable of analyzing traffic traces of hundreds millions packets associated to millions of conversations.
    • sniffit,
    • Snoop is similar to tcpdump and is bundled with the Sun/Solaris Unix operating system.
    • Snuffle is a measurement tool for capturing the protocol messages, internal protocol states and to measure implementation performance on networking nodes. Snuffle consists of a set of modules placed in the kernel, device driver and user space. Currently measuring probes for UDP, IP and IEEE 802.11b MAC are implemented.
    • TansuTCP (TT) is a TCP trace utility which listens on a local port and then forwards tcp packets to another server. You can see and save binary / text data to a file or you can load binary data from a file.
    • Tcpdpriv is a program for eliminating confidential information from packets collected on a network interface (or, from trace files created using the -w argument to tcpdump).
    • tcpdump. There is also a version for Windowstcpillust takes tcpdump file(s) specified at the command line and draws pictures like figures in the “TCP/IP Illustrated” series. You can see sample screen images of tcpillust or screen guide at http://www.jp.nishida.org/tcpillust/index.html.
    • TCPurify is a packet sniffer/capture program similar to tcpdump, but with much reduced functionality. What sets TCPurify apart from other, similar programs is its focus on privacy. TCPurify is designed from the ground up to protect the privacy of users on the sniffed network as much as possible.
    • TCPshow is a Unix based program that parses the output file of TCPdump into human readable text.
    • Tcptrace is a TCP dump file analysis tool written by Shawn Ostermann at Ohio University.
    • trafd is a traffic accounting daemon for Linux and FreeBSD, built on top of libpcap, with accompanying tools to manage its data.
    • trafshow continuously displays information regarding packet traffic on the configured network interface that match the boolean expression.
    • Tstat TCP statistic and analysis tool (Unix/Linux based) – allows collecting network performance indexes from passive traffic analysis (i.e. packet traces), at both network (IP) layer, and at transport (TCP/UDP/RTP/RTCP) layer. It can be used to persistently monitor links, thanks to the integration with the RRD database.
    • WinPcap is an architecture for packet capture and network analysis for the Win32 platforms, based on the model of BPF and libpcap for UNIX. See also libcap for windows and libpcap for Unix.
  • Path Characterization & Bandwidth Estimation
    • ABwE Available Bandwidth Estimator.
    • Bandwidth Estimation Tools a compendium of tools maintained by Sally Floyd.
    • MTUPath discovers one-way path MTU to a host(IPv4 and IPv6)
    • PathChirp
    • Pathload measures the available bandwidth of a link.
    • Pathneck is an active probing tool that can detect bottleneck location of network path. It only needs single end control, and has relatively small probing overhead (33.6KB for one probing in the default setting).
    • Pathprobe is a MIB tool that uses TCP and web100 to probe and characterize the path between two hosts. The goal of this tool is to run hop-by-hop tests to determine if the paths along the way are capable of supporting the desired end-to-end target bandwidth between the sender and receiver.
    • Pathrate measures end-to-end capacity
    • Pchar an independent implementation of Van Jacobsens pathchar with more intelligible output. Available for FreeBSD, Solaris, Linux, IRIX
    • Pipechar a tool for reporting dynamic network characteristics in particular the bottleneck bandwidth. It is now part on the Network Characterization Service (NCS).
    • STAB short for spatio-temporal available bandwidth estimator, locate congested links on an end-to-end network path.
  • Ping
    • arping is an ARP level ping utility. It’s good for finding out if an IP is taken before you have routing to that subnet. It can also ping MAC addresses directly. It is pre-installed on some Linux installations, but requires sudo priviledges.
    • fping is similar to ping but is optimized to ping a large number of hosts in parallel.
    • Fpinger Visualizes your computer network as an animated screen that lets you perform administration functions, monitoring, pinging, scanning, exporting, looking for software and hardware over the network.
    • FREEping will ping all your 2003-XP-2000-NT servers (or any other IP address) in free-definable intervals. FREEping will send you a popup when one of the 2003-XP-2000-NT servers stops responding
    • Just-ping pings from 8 locations worldwide to a host you select.
    • MTR (Matt’s traceroute) combines the functionality of the ‘traceroute’ and ‘ping’ programs in a single network diagnostic tool.
    • MultiPing Grapher MultiPing Grapher is a further development of Perfping with the ability to graph up to 10 different ICMP results. Includes logging and average calculation.
    • pathping is built into Windows 2000, it pings all nodes along a route.
    • Perfping a tool for testing availability, response times and performance using ICMP. Writes data to a text file for later interpretation with e.g. Excel. Allows you to change IP address, ICMP timeout and data size during runtime. Comes with a nice little graph for realtime testing.
    • Pingroute.pl is a simple Perl script to ping all nodes along a traceroute and provide min, max, avg response time, plus packet loss analysis for 100 and 1400 byte packets. The source is freely available for SunOS, Solaris, Linux, AIX and Digital OSF1.
    • Pingsweep Widnows tool to enabls sweeping a subnet range by pinging each host address in the range
    • TCP based pings use TCP to figure out the Round Trip Time (RTT)
      • hping2 hping is a command-line oriented TCP/IP packet assembler/analyzer. The interface is inspired to the ping(8) unix command, but hping isn’t only able to send ICMP echo requests. It supports TCP, UDP, ICMP and RAW-IP protocols, has a traceroute mode, the ability to send files between a covered channel, and many other features.
      • Tping also can ping more than one host at a time.
    • TRIUMF’s Visual Ping provides a Web page that the user can make ping transfer rate measurements between the Web server and the browser.
    • hping2 is a network tool able to send custom ICMP/UDP/TCP packets and to display target replies like ping do with ICMP replies.
    • Zinger a small Perl program that pings the closest router on network and reports any loss of connection. When it detects a problem, it does two things. First, it announces the problem over the PC speakers. Then, it writes the time and date to a log file. When the connection comes back up, the program writes another entry in the log and announces the happy event over the speakers again.
  • Qcheck checks network response time, throughput, and streaming performance, by means of thin agents installed on hosts that are to be checked.
  • RANCID monitors a router’s (or device’s) configuration, including software and hardware (cards, serial numbers, etc), using CVS. Rancid logs into each of the devices in a router table file, runs various commands, chomps the output, and emails any differences ( sample) from the previous collection to a mail list.
  • Rider measures available bandwidth, latency, and streaming performance (including noticing consecutive lost packets — a key measure for VoIP) using lightweight performance agents that include a built-in web server. Using a web browser for a GUI provides many extra useful features, such as the ability to save and print results, and the ability to bookmark tests (and even make a page of tests for your intranet.)
  • RRDtool (Round Robin Database tool) is a system to store and display time-series data.
    • Cacti is a complete network graphing solution designed to harness the power of RRDTool’s data storage and graphing functionality.
    • Cricket is a high performance, flexible system for monitoring trends in time-series data. The collector runs from cron every 5 minutes (by default), and stores data into a file-based database managed by the RRD Tool. Later, when you want to check on the data you have collected, you can use a web-based interface to view graphs of the data.
    • ElvinRRD is a tool to provide a mechanism for transporting data across a network and storing it in RRD databases. ElvinRRD is written entirely in Python and works with (and requires) both Elvin and RRDtool. Any Elvin producer (client) can send data for ElvinRRD to store (e.g., EDDIE-Tool); and any RRD-aware software can process the resulting RRD databases (e.g., Cricket, Cacti).
    • Host Grapher II is a light program that uses RRD to draw graphics of Hosts for Network, Processes, CPU, Memory etc. Writing addicional plugins is quite simple. Works on all major UNIX platforms and on win32.
    • NetMRG is a tool for network monitoring, reporting, and graphing. Based on RRDTOOL, NetMRG is capable of creating graphs of any parameter of your network.
    • NMIS Network Management Information System is an SNMP polling and statistics viewer front-end to Tobi Oetiker’s RRDTool.
    • Orca is a tool useful for plotting arbitrary data from text files onto a directory on a Web server.
    • remstats Remstats is a system of programs to: gather data from servers and routers, store and maintain the data for long periods, produce graphs and web-pages tieing them together, and monitor the data for anomalous behavious and issue alerts. This software is a pretty good hack to wrap around rrdtool as collector and presenter, easy to set up with not to much prerequesits. It only needs a some perlmodules and perl. Its under GPL and is able to maintain and monitor big environments.
    • SmokePing measures latency and packet loss in your network. Uses RRDtool to maintain a longterm datastore and to draw pretty graphs giving up to the minute information on the state of each network connection.
    • Torrus is designed to be the universal data series processing framework. Its has a scalable hierarchical design, with an application-independent core, and highly customizable architecture. Suitable for small installations and for big enterprise or carrier networks. Although most of our users deploy Torrus for SNMP monitoring, it might be useful for data series of any nature. Tobi Oetiker’s RRDtool is used for data storage.
  • RouteViews is a tool for Internet operators to obtain real-time information about the global routing system from the perspectives of several different backbones and locations around the Internet.
  • SNMP:Analyse It
       is a shareware device poller that produces graphical performance reports for devices. You use it for trend analysis. The reports are in HTTP format for global organization view ability. Enables pro active network availability, performance, reliability and utilization reporting.

    • CMU SNMP
    • EzMgt MIB Browser is a free tool that includes a MIB Editor, SNMP Query View and SNMP Tracer View.
    • Interface Traffic Indicator Interface Traffic Indicator, a graph utility to measure incoming and outgoing traffic on an interface in bits/sec, bytes/sec or utilization. Works on all SNMP-capable devices (computers, NICs, switches, routers, etc.) with adjustable poll interval down to three seconds. You can use this program in a professional network environment to monitor selected network interfaces (even backplane ports if the device provides the information) or you can monitor your home network or cable/modem/ISDN connection to the internet.
    • Mibbrowser Mibbrowser is a tool that retrieves all MIB data (OIDs and values) from SNMP-capable network devices. It can be used to find out what kind of MIB data is available from a device.
    • STC is a free command line tool to get and compare, side by side, SNMP tables entries from different computers. The output is always in XML format which is by default associated with a XSL script. So it can be processed later or immediately viewed with a WEB browser.
    • Tricklet man pages
    • UCD SNMP public domain tools
  • SolarWinds Free Tools provides many free tools for everydays tasks performed by network professionals. Includes uploading/downloading executabe images to network devices, IP address tracking, syslog server, monitoring of some applications, netflow etc.
  • Spong Son of Pong (spong) is a simple system monitoring package, that will monitor system attributes and network services on a variety of machines. It will gather status reports and contact staff if there are problems. It will also summarize the information and display it via a web interface
  • TCPtune a TCP stack tuner for Windows
  • telnet
  • Thruput tools (also see the FTP tools):
    • BWCTL is a command line client application and a scheduling and policy daemon that wraps the throughput testing tools Iperf, Thrulay, and Nuttcp. These tests can measure maximum TCP bandwidth, with various tuning options available, or, by doing a UDP test, the delay, jitter, and datagram loss of a network
    • bulk is achievable performance measurement tool (iperf-like), which allows real-time monitoring of any socket options and their members, particularly TCP_INFO option, which provides useful clues for performance debugging. You can monitor rtt, cwnd, ssthresh, retransmits, etc. down to per sent segment, if you wish. The tool does not require root access or any kernel patch (even though it works with an accompanying AIMD patch for per-socket AIMD tuning).
    • gen_send/gen_recv a simple UDP trafic generator.
    • IPerf is a tool for measuring maximum TCP and UDP bandwidth, reminiscent of tools such as ttcp. It has been written to overcome the shortcomings of those aging tools. Jperf is a Java implementation.
    • netperf maintained by HP, is a general measure of performance of a network. Provides a measure of latency between request and response of generic transactions across a TCP/IP network.
    • Nuttcp is a tool for measuring TCP achievable throughput.
    • RUDE stands for Real-time UDP Data Emitter and CRUDE for Collector for RUDE. RUDE is a small and flexible program that generates traffic to the network, which can be received and logged on the other side of the network with the CRUDE.
    • Tcpspray sends data to either the discard or echo TCP service on the specified host and prints the average throughput.
    • thrulay measures achievable UDP and TCP single stream throughputs (currently only supports Linux) also provides RTT estimates.
    • TReno a tool to function as a basis for a formal bulk transfer metric for the Internet.
    • ttcp
  • Traceroute (also see the Traceroute Servers web site, and commercial traceroute products)
    • man pageswhere to get it, and traceroute servers.
    • Gtrace is a traceroute visualization tool that uses a combination of methods to either determine or guess at the physical location of a node in the traceroute path. It is flexible enough to support addition of new databases, heuristics to map IP addresses to physical location and maps.
    • mturoute is a small Windows tool to determine the path MTU between you and a specified host. In traceroute mode it will additionally show you the mtu at every hop between you and the specified host.
    • NeoTrace provides graphical traceroute information.
    • pathping a Windows NT utility to do a traceroute and then measure to each node along the route.
    • Prtraceroute is a version of traceroute, from the RIPE Internet Routing Registry toolset, that presents routing policy information together with the real time packet trace obtained from traceroute. It adds AS information to the normal traceroute output, making use of Routing Registry (RR) database information.
    • Scamper is a program that conducts traceroute to large numbers of IPv4 and IPv6 addresses in parallel to fill a specified packets-per-second rate.
    • TCPtraceroute uses TCP to a port at the end node to do a traceroute.
    • The tracepath for Linux is like traceroute but does not need superuser and has no fancy options. It does discover the PMTU along the route.
    • Traceroute-nanog has additional features like AS lookup, TOS support, microsecond timestamps, path MTU discovery, parallel probing and others.
    • VisualRoute a GUI based traceroute for Windows.
  • Zabbix is software for application and network monitoring. Zabbix supports both polling and trapping techniques to collect data from monitored hosts. Flexible notification mechanism allows easy and quckly configure email notifications for pre-defined events.

Network Monitoring Software: Web Tools

  • Benchmarking
    • WAPT (Web Site APplication Testing) is a web load and stress testing tool that provides a way of testing web sites, web servers, and intranet applications with web interfaces.
    • WCAT is a Web Capacity Analysis Tool freely available from Microsoft.
    • WebStone from MindCraft measures raw throughput of a standard HTTP workload.
    • Web Server Stress Tool is a powerful HTTP client/server test application, designed to pinpoint critical performance issues in your web site or web server that may prevent optimal experience for your site’s visitors. Supports SSL.
    • WWW performance monitoring
  • Website Monitoring
    • BasicState is a free hosted service for monitoring the status of http servers. Subscribers can also add popular ecommerce partner sites to their alert specifications.
    • EZ WebSite Monitoring monitors uptime, response time/quality, history, popularity ranking, and tracking important changes.
    • DownorNot shows actual and past information about the uptime of (mainly) popular websites
    • hostUcan Free monitoring of uptime and performance of a web site from multiple geographic locations. is a web based tool for monitoring web sites and sending alerts on performance or downtime failures.
    • Panopta is a server monitoring service and outage management system for online businesses and service providers, providing the ability to detect outages immediately, then notify the right people about the outage, and finally, give a team the right tools to resolve the outage quickly.
    • Pingdom lets you monitor the uptime and response time of your web site or servers from several locations around the world. See your historical performance and make sure that you have a acceptable availability so you are not loosing customers and visitors. You can also receive SMS and email notifications if any downtime occurs so you can fix any errors the minute they happen.
    • RedAlert is a Web site monitoring service that can perform end-to-end checks of your a site every 5 or 15 minutes. It can also monitor DNS, email, news & telnet servers.
    • SITEImpulse Website Monitoring providing 1 minute availability monitoring. It has 3 monitoring stations on different continents. Email, SMS and RSS alerts.
    • StressWalk is a pre-production infrastructure testing service powered by Absolute Performance’s System Shepherd(r) WebWalk(tm). It uses an automated high load of simulations of your end-users’ website behavior.
    • WebMetrics Globalwatch provides performance monitoring and metrics for a broad range of websites, internet applications and services. It provides the information for customer-centric decision-making for those providing web-enabled services.
    • WebPerform provides website performance monitoring and testing services from network locations in major cities across the globe. Drill-down object, host, and component level detail on test runs, reporting, and alerting help companies identify and resolve availability issues and performance problems.
    • Website Monitoring is a free website monitoring application released under the GPL that provides an uptime monitoring tool.
    • WebWalk is a proven dynamic feature that uses synthetic transactions to measure application performance from the end-user perspective.
    • WebWatchBot provides monitoring, notification, and analysis software for web sites and IP devices, providing email alerts, reporting and performance metrics.
  • Webalizer is a fast, free web server log file analysis program. It produces highly detailed, easily configurable usage reports in HTML format, for viewing with a standard web browser.