PingPlotter

PingPlotter Standard is a lightweight network troubleshooting, diagnostic and monitoring tool. It can run in the background collecting data while you continue to run applications and then allow you to quickly look at the data in an intuitive graphical format when you experience problems (reduced call quality for VoIP, slowdowns or disconnects with applications, etc.). PingPlotter Standard is also great at allowing you to collect data over time to give you the information you really need to identify intermittent problems and allowing you to see both short-term and long-term trends.

PingPlotter allows you to "See the network", and "Pinpoint problems" by taking traceroute, ping, and whois to a new level. It's fast, and the graphical aspects make it easy to quickly see where a problem is occuring. Alerts, statistics, and numerous other features give the you the extra power you need to find and troubleshoot problems.

PingPlotter Standard adds quite a bit to the freeware version 1. Version 1 is still freeware (and available here). We also offer a version of PingPlotter called PingPlotter Professional, or PingPlotter Pro,with additional features geared towards network administrators and power users. Please see the feature comparison chart if you're interested in seeing the differences between the PingPlotter Freeware, PingPlotter Standard and PingPlotter Pro. All versions of PingPlotter run under Windows, the most recent versions are supported under Windows 95, 98, NT, 2000, XP, and 2003.

Features in PingPlotter Standard v 3.40 include:

• Easy to use! PingPlotter's basic mode means you just type in the address you want information about and hit "Trace". It starts tracing and shows you a graph. Someone with no network experience can see where their packets are being dropped, and then contact their ISP with this information.
• Graphs the response time through the route of the packet from source to destination. This really highlights problem hops, and lets you concentrate on trouble areas.
• Uses multiple threads to increase performance and accuracy. This means that PingPlotter doesn't wait for hop 1 to respond before sending out a request to hop 2. A complete 1 sample trace can be done in about 5-10% of the time it takes to do a trace with the Windows "TRACERT" command (usually less than 1 second for PingPlotter vs 15-45 seconds for TraceRT).
• Graphs any host over time, allowing you to scroll back and forth over time, and zoom in on any specific time to find out where problems occur. You can even graph multiple hops at the same time.
• PingPlotter's graph can be resized, rescaled, zoomed, dragged and manipulated to give you exactly the information you need to find a problem. Helps you identify whether a connectivity problem is your ISP or network, the host you're connecting to or somewhere on the internet between you and the remote host. PingPlotter will even help you identify which network (Digex, Cable & Wireless, Alternet, MCI, Sprint, etc.) is the source of your problem down to the specific node.
• Creates nice images (via clipboard copy, or saving as BMP, GIF or PNG files) that can be sent via e-mail. Face it, text dumps of a bunch of numbers aren't always the most compelling evidence. Put a picture on that data that shows where the problem lies and let your network provider argue with you then!
• Schedule automatic saving of images (BMP, GIF or PNG format), or saving of the underlying raw data. You can use this to collect data over a long period automatically.
• Keep track of route changes. No other product tracks route changes like PingPlotter - giving you the ability to see what route your data was taking at any time in your tracing session.
• Can do traceroute using either Windows-standard ICMP echo requests, Unix-standard UDP requests, or TCP requests (ie: HTTP, FTP, etc). Some ISPs block one, and not the other - this gives you more opportunities to be able to collect performance data - even if your ISP doesn't want you to.
• Exports any portion of your collected data to a text file for analysis by other software packages (e.g. Microsoft Excel). If PingPlotter doesn't graph it the way you want it, use your favorite graphing software and do it yourself!
• Built for long-term monitoring. PingPlotter works GREAT for overnight or even multiple-day monitoring projects. Set your interval and let it run. Check back later and review the history to find out trends and problem times. Does the speed degrade at 9PM and improve at 1AM? PingPlotter will make that VERY clear and give you all the data to present to your ISP.
• Will save your accumulated data for a host to a file and then allow you to reload and continue. Some users have reported running PingPlotter continously for months, and we've been running it here at Nessoft continuously for years. We have well over 20 million samples collected and automatically saved for the last 4+ years of Nessoft.com site performance!
• You can save and load sample sets, and then resume the trace. This way you can have multiple sessions of data in the same graph.
• High performance, low overhead. There is no traceroute package available that returns results faster. PingPlotter is FAST and it uses very little CPU to do its job. That means you can run it continuously without interfering with your other tasks.
• Alerts! Alerts will allow you to set parameters where you want to be notified of the condition. If the conditions fire an alert, you can log that data to a text file, play a wave file, launch another program of your choice, change your tray icon, or send yourself e-mail with the pertinent information included.
• Built-in Whois. You can query for a server by name, or the ARIN servers by IP address (to see who owns and runs a particular IP address).

Still not convinced? There's a lot more features than we've addressed here. Just download it and check it out for yourself!