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Steve3456
15 pts.
 Utility to measure Network congestion
Network monitoring, Network testing, Performance monitoring
I am looking for a tool (hopefully freeware) to measure network utilization and collision rate? Hopefully an executable that does not require intallation.

Yes, Performance Monitor built into Windows can do it, but I don't have the patience to spend 2 hours trying to figure out how to set it up. The interface is not the greatest.

There are tools that have dozens or hundreds of menu items and buttons - that's not what I want. either. I just want to measure these two parameters on different subnets.

Do you know of a good tool to do this?
ASKED: Mar 27, 2008  10:57 PM GMT
UPDATED: March 31, 2008  1:23:54 PM GMT
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Labnuke99
32,405 pts.
Answer Wiki:
I would recommend using a switch with built-in management like snmp or rmon. You will be able to get these statistics easily then.

Wireshark is a free packet capture & protocol analyzer tool, however it is not necessarily very user friendly in generating statistics like a commercial package like Sniffer or OmniPeek.
Last Wiki Answer Submitted:  Mar 28, 2008  0:12 AM (GMT)  by  Labnuke99   32,405 pts.
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Thanks Labnuke99,

I checked out your suggestions and they were a big help. Both Sniffer and OmniPeek have no prices listed - they want you to call them for prices. This likely means they are in the thousands of dollars and need a sales rep to talk you into purchasing. So they are out of my budget. However, there were some useful whitepapers at the Netscout Sniffer site.

A managed switch with a laptop might be a solution but not as portable as I would like.

I liked Wireshark - mainly because there seems to be some high quality training offered by Laura Chappell. An app isn’t much good unless you know how to use it and the training, though expensive, seems well presented. Additionally, the training would be less money than purchasing either Sniffer or OmniPeek.

Thanks so much for the help.

Steve3456
 15 pts.
 

Glad to assist. There’s lots of free SNMP tools out there. A good place to start is here. A good tool I use to quickly capture some stats is called getif. It can graph data for you and give you a quick snapshot.

Labnuke99
 32,405 pts.