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  Asked: Mar 27 2008   10:57 PM GMT
  Asked by: Steve3456

Utility to measure Network congestion


Network testing, Network monitoring, 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?

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Last Answered: Mar 28 2008  0:12 AM GMT  by Labnuke99




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.
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Steve3456  |   Mar 29 2008  9:10PM GMT

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.

 

Labnuke99  |   Mar 31 2008  1:23PM GMT

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.