The following Network Monitoring Tools grew out of a list that were reported to be in use at 11 ESnet sites in a survey made by the ESnet Network Monitoring Task Force (NMTF) and completed in October 1995. For some anapshots of earlier web pages see the Internet Archive Wayback site. Where possible I have provided hypertext links to further sources of information on the tool. These links vary in quality ranging from a pointer to the vendors home page, to the man pages entry, and to how to download the code. This is a volunteer, unfunded effort. Increasingly new additions are from reader suggestions/recommendations that indicate where the tool fits in the hierarchy and provide a short one sentence description of the tool's purpose.

Commercial Monitoring Tools, not integrated with an NMP

• 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • Easy Service Monitor (ESM) will monitor network services to see if they can work properly with a predefined time interval. It runs on Windows.
  • 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.
  • LANExplorer provides packet capture, decode, filtering, matrix, host table, statistics, theresholding and alarms for Windows hosts.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • Observer from Network Instruments is a network analyser (Packet sniffer) for 10/100/1000 100/1000 Full Duplex and Multi truncked 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.
  • 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.
  • WildPackets Omni fault analysis platform for optimizing network services and improving uptime on enterprise networks.
• Applications/Services monitoring
  • 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.
  • Alertra Checks (http, https, ping, SMTP, POP3, IMAP4, FTP, TCP) web server from multiple stations around the world.
  • 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.
  • Chariot evaluates the performance of networked applications, performs stress tests of network devices and predicts networked application performance prior to deployment.
  • CleverEye providea availability monitoring software for servers, network appliances, databases and applications.
  • Windows based too to monitor website, servers and network devices.
  • CyberGauge using SNMP automatically creates utilization graphs as well as daily, weekly and monthly QoS and utilzation reports.
  • DotCom 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.
  • 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.
  • Ganymede provides performance management for clients,servers, applications, and the network as an integrated system.
  • IPCheck Server Monitor Network Up-/Downtime Monitoring Monitors critical network resources and detects system failures or performance problems. Freeware available.
  • Network Physics 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
  • 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
  • MonitorIT monitors, detects, alerts, diagnoses, measures, collects and reports on Windows Servers/Workstations, SNMP & SYSLOG Devices
  • 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.
  • Network Security Monitoring Tools
    • QRadar isolates the source and identifies corrective measures for dangers hiding in daily network activity.
  • 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.
  • NPS Network Performance Services provides network, system, application, and security monitoring products and services via a 7x24 Network Operations Center. All products and services include automated and customized alerting, and web based performance reporting.
  • 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.
  • Server Nanny Network Monitor monitors servers and network devices, sends problem notifications, performs actions, and logs performance data.
  • SiteAlive features centralized, agentless monitoring of web and data base servers/applications.
  • Vantage is Compuware's integrated suite of application performance management products, emphasizing response time metrics integrated with end-to-end performance analysis, presented in both technical and business views.
  • Vigilix event detection and notification software for applications.
  • WatchTower system monitoring and management software application that runs within a Web-based portal environment.
• elkMonitor monitors your sites around the clock from servers across the globe, elkMonitor will alert you to signs of trouble.
• DSLReports provide measurement reports (e.g. speed tests, security scans, loss).
• Flow Monitoring
  • 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.
  • NetDetecor 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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).
• 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
• HipLinXS 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.
• Internet Periscope includes a wide array of tools including security, that allow System Administrators to "see" how well their hosts are functioning on the Internet.
• ipMonitor is a secure, real-time network monitoring solution you can use to proactively Monitor, Alert and Recover your critical applications, servers and infrastructure equipment.
• ISDNwatch is an ISDN network management suite for your ISDN routers.
• 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.
• MeasureNet.
• 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.
• NetArx Network Monitoring System monitors client systems and reports information to the Netarx Network Operations Center ("NOC"); a fully staffed vault operating 24 hours a day. The NOC notifies on-site contacts of service failures and proactively detected potential problems.
• NetPredict helps you monitor, predict and optimize the performance of distributed business applications.
• Network Health family from Concord.
• NetMedic.
• 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. PacketStorm IP Network Emulators reproduce the unfavorable conditions of IP Networks and WANs in a controllable and repeatable lab setting.
• PingGraph is a multi-threaded graphical TCP/IP network monitoring and diagnostic tool for Windows 95 and NT.
• Procom+ ISDN/Modem monitoring
• ResponseNetworks provides tools for network service level monitoring and measurements.
• RIPmon provides remote monitoring over IP networks using an agent that physically connects to and communicates with any element through LAN ports, serial ports and/or contact closures. Once connected the agent units interact with the device in native format and translate user queries into SNMP and HTTP responses.
• ROMmon develops easily deployable online network performance metric (passive and active) monitoring system for networking professionals. The system's emphasis are on data aggregation, high availability and high scalability.
• 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.
• Shunra develops testing and evaluation tools for internet and intranet based network technologies and products.
• 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.
  • LoriotPro a generic SNMP manager
  • 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.
  • Quallaby provides PROVISO 2.0, network monitoring and service assurance solution for network service providers.
  • 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
  • TrapBlaster SNMP trap management engine that receives, filters and converts SNMP traps. They may then be forwarded to your network management applications.
  • WinTDS monitors IP-SNMP devices and gives a variety of real-time views of the network status.
• Shiva Network Manager
• Shiva InterNet Manager
• StatScope from IP Sciences is an outsourced service providing a customized IP network monitoring and reporting capability.
• TelAlert from TeleMon 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
  • VisualRoute a GUI based traceroute for Windows.
• Triticom has software based network protocol analyzers, LAN traffic monitors, RMON probes, and an SNMP manager.
• USR Total Control.
• 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.
• Vivere Networks have a wireless sensor that monitor and analyze multi-AP topologies in real-time, including 802.11 packets for all access points in range as well as other IP network traffic.
• VoIP (Voice over IP)
  • Prognosis provides systems management software for performance monitoring of IP telephony, VOIP, availability, network management, Windows, UNIX and Linux.
  • QOVIA provides Voice over IP monitoring and management, sends alerts when it predicts call quality will be affected.
  • 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.

Public Domain or Free Network Monitoring Tools

• ANL Web100 based Network Configuration Tester tests the reliablity and operational status of your network link.
• Application Monitoring
  • 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)
• 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).
• 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.
• Dig
• 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).
• 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, ...).
• 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.
• 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.
  • 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.
  • 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
  • WU-FTPD is a popular FTP server from Washington University.
• 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.
• JetMon is a client-server link monitoring tool for NOC operations, written in Java. The server pings a list of network devices, reporting the state to the clients.
• Lachesis a tool from Intel to monitor and report on response time and packet loss to "landmark" Internet sites. It is based on the publically available tool Imeter.
• LinkRank BGP dynamics visualization tool "LinkRank" also presented at Nanog 32 at Reston, VA (http://www.nanog.org/mtg-0410/lad.html).
• 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.
• Monitoring Infrastructures
  • Cheops is an Open Source Network User Interface designed to unify your network utilities.
  • CycleTraders, is a cooperative network of users that gather critical information about the status of each other's website.
  • Ganglia is a scalable distributed monitoring system for high-performance computing systems such as clusters and Grids.
  • 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 provides an integrated graphical interface for a set of tools that allows the measurement of QoS parameters over IPv4 and IPv6 networks. Network Performance Meter (netmeter) is an Tcl/Tk application which tries to solve these tasks in a flexible and modular way.
  • Network Performance Advisor is a single application which integrates the measuring, analyzing, and displaying of network performance statistics.
  • NIMI
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • Website Monitoring is a free website monitoring application released under the GPL that provides an uptime monitoring tool.
  • Wombat monitors the availability and operation of websites. When your website goes down or produces a defineable error, WOMbot will automatically notify you via SMS and Email.
• mrtg Multi Router Traffic Grapher. Also available from OPENXTRA.
• NetLogger tools to make it easy to instrument distributed applications and visualize the results.
• NetNow a prototype tool providing realtime NAP & ISP backbone delay & packet loss performance statistics.
• netstat
• 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.
• 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.
• Ntop is a Unix tool that shows the network usage, similar to the popular top Unix command.
• NOCOL
• nslookup
• Packet capture tools. (see also commercial capture tools) Before using these tools on your site you should check with your network securit 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • Cflowd is an experimental tool to collect data from Cisco's netflow export feature.
  • 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 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.
  • flstats is program for extracting flow statistics from trace files created using the -w argument to tcpdump.
  • Natas is an opensource windows 2000 network sniffer.
  • NetraMet and other realtime flow meters designed for Internet accounting including NetraMet (a traffic meter), NeMac (a combined manager & meter_reader) and NIFTY (a traffic flow analyzer).
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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 Windows 9x, NT & 2000.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • Bing is a point-to-point bandwidth measurement tool (hence the 'b'), based on ping. You can download it from here
  • Bprobe & cprobe provide measurement of bottleneck and congestion bandwidth using ping.
  • Clink is a tool for estimating Internet link characteristics.
  • Nettimer is a project to do end-to-end network performance measurement. It can listen passively to existing network traffic or actively probe the network
  • Pathchar is a tool to infer the characteristics of Internet paths. There are some usage notes from CAIDA. There is also a SIGCOMM '99 paper on Using pathchar to estimate Inernet link characteristics by Allen Downey.
  • PathChirp
  • Pathload measures the available bandwidth of a link.
  • 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.
  • STAB short for spatio-temporal available bandwidth estimator, locate congested links on an end-to-end network path.
• Ping
  • fping is similar to ping but is optimized to ping a large number of hosts in parallel. You may be able to download from here.
  • 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
  • pathping is built into Windows 2000, it pings all nodes along a route.
  • MTR combines the functionality of the 'traceroute' and 'ping' programs in a single network diagnostic tool.
  • Ping 'Classic' and the Nikhef Ping variant and its man page.
  • The SLAC/HEPNRC PingER suite of ping tools for monitoring response time, packet loss etc. are available via the PingER Tools from the ICFA-NTF WG on Monitoring page.
  • 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.
  • TCP based pings use TCP to figure out the Round Trip Time (RTT)
    • Synack measures the Round Trip Time to establish a TCP session using the SYN request and SYN/ACK response, allows specification of the TCP port.
    • Tping also also can ping more than one host at a time.
  • Traceping measures the packet loss to nodes along a route.
  • 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.
• RRDtool (Round Robin Database tool) is a system to store and display time-series data.
  • Bronc is a package of utilities that allow you to gather and visualize data in the form of graphs. It uses RRD and is similar in function to Cricket and MRTG, though it is claimed to be faster.
  • 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.
  • 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.
• 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 or for a Perl5 extension module
  • 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 and code
  • UCD SNMP public domain tools
• 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
• Sting end-to-end active monitoring tool that estimates one way loss through careful manipulation and observation of TCP behavior.
• TCPtune a TCP stack tuner for Windows
• telnet
• Thruput tools (also see the FTP tools):
  • gen_send/gen_recv a simple UDP trafic generator.
  • I2perf can report TCP throughput periodically so that TCP performance plots can be produced. Unlike other tools, i2perf not only reports goodput, but round-trip delay time as well. The output of i2perf is easy to parse by machine (in fact, it's ready to be used as a data file for gnuplot).
  • 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.
  • The MGEN toolset provides programs for sourcing/sinking real-time multicast/unicast UDP/IP traffic flows.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • TReno a tool to function as a basis for a formal bulk transfer metric for the Internet.
  • ttcp
  • UDPmon This is a set of tools using UDP and TCP to give estimates of the request-response latency and bandwidth found in the route between the two end nodes. See also Some Tools used for Testing Network Behaviour.
• Traceroute (also see the commercial traceroute products)
  • man pages, where to get it, the traceroute NIKHEF variant 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.

Web Benchmarking Tools

• WCAT is a Web Capacity Analysis Tool freely available from Microsoft.
• WebStone from MindCraft measures raw throughput of a standard HTTP workload, see also the NCSA Web Server Performance page.
• WWW performance monitoring

Auxiliary Tools to Enable Monitoring, Analysis, Report Creation or Simulation

Further Information

• CAIDA Measurement Tool Taxonomy provides a preliminary overview of Internet and TCP/IP performance measurement tools and efforts and distinguishes tools used to measure the Internet from general TCP/IP performance tools.
• CIAC's List of Unix Network Monitoring Tools
• Computing Vendors Online.
• Digex's Internet tools.
• INS 1997 Survey Results on Network Performance Management.
• Internet Tools
is a compact, comprehensive, carefully organized set of links to essential Internet sites about Internet-based tools for information, interaction, and communication.
• Inventory of Tools & Methods: Public Domain Network Measurement Tools consists of a small selection of freely available network performance measurement tools.
• Network Management tools
• Network Probe Daemon (NPD) project is a continuation of a study carried out by Vern Paxson of LBNL in 1994-95.
• Netspec a Network Performance Evaluation and Experimentation Tool from the University of Kansas.
• NIH's Network and Network Monitoring Software list.
• NLANR Advanced Applications Database is an online resource that provides access to information about networked research and education projects, applications, and resources that are related. You can view information about the more than 2,400 projects entered in the AAD by using keyword searches or preformatted reports.
• Routing Arbiter tools from Merit/ISI.
• Terena Guide to network resource Tools a guide to network tools and innovation for users of all levels of expertise.
• ServerFiles.com is a software directory for network administrators and IT professionals that are looking for networking & server software for Windows 2003, Windows 2000 or Windows NT.
• WebAttack a large collection of Internet Tools.
• WindowsNetworking.com provides tutorials on various Windows networking related topics such as setting up Windows NT/XP/2000/2003 networks, troubleshooting, connectivity and more. Also includes a comprehensive archive of reviewed networking software.
• The X Consortium's Anonymous FTP Archive.

[ http://www.slac.stanford.edu/xorg/nmtf/nmtf-tools.html ]