Are there any free/cheap network bandwidth tools?

[1665]

Hi, occasionally our network becomes slow and I don't now what it can be as the servers (after checking perfomance monitors counters) seem to be doing nothing and I wondered if there is any cheap/free network scanners to find out whats taking up the bandwidth?

Regards

A

 

[BruceB7]

http://www.webattack.com/freeware/network/fwnetmoni.html

The First link might help, there are also some other things you might want to look at on the site, they have a section where you can also purchase better software.

Good Luck.

 

[yizhar]

HI.

Here is another one:

http://www.tamos.com/products/commview/

It's not free but you can download the 30 day trial and then decide.

You should note that such a snifer (and all other that work the same way) will not see all the traffic in a switched LAN and therefor might give you partial results:

http://www.tamos.com/products/commview/faq.php#q20

MRTG is free tool that you can use to monitor network devices (switch router firewall server):

http://people.ee.ethz.ch/~oetiker/webtools/mrtg/index-2.html

It will take you some time to implement, but it worth it.

Most network devices (switch, router) have their own interface that you can use to get more info. Check documentation of your switch if it is a managed one.

There is a simple free tool of mine called TESTFILE - you can use it to measure the bottom line performance for SMB file sharing:

http://teachers.sivan.co.il/yizhar/

(It is part of the NUTS bundle).

I know that it is not what you asked for, but inviting an expert to help you troubleshoot such problem can be cost effective.
Now you're shooting in the dark, with more tools you'll have more light, and someone with good experience will guide you in which direction to (T)shoot.



Yizhar Hurwitz

http://teachers.sivan.co.il/yizhar

 

[AustinPowers]

Hola,

The first thing you might want to look into is the memory situation on the servers. When users (most noticable with MAC users) downloading/uploading large files simultaneously, Nt servers can come to a crawl.

Hope this helps!

AP