Member Avatar for guyinpv

Hi, I am IT for an office of about 10 employees and up to 12 computers or so in the office. I'm looking into upgrading our cable and getting on DOCSIS 3 and faster speeds. However, before I start buying new offerings from our ISP and replacing the modem and potentially older router/switch, I'd like to be able to run some kind of benchmarks, speed tests, or otherwise record what we have now to compare against after the upgrades.

Some examples, maybe weekly our connection drops one or two times, maybe only a minute or so, but up to 5 or 10 minutes in the past. So I'd like to record things like how stable our connection is, track over time how fast and slow it gets, packet loss, ping times, etc etc...
We happen to use Thunderbird as a desktop email client, and more often than not it times out when connecting to outgoing server (ISP's server) and we have to retry to send. So if there is some way to track on individual PCs what their network usage looks like, to see if their quality goes up after upgrades? If I can track packet loss, retry attempts, timeouts, DNS lookup times, how often or how slow it takes for their systems to connect to web pages, etc.

As of now I have zero network monitoring, haven't had the time to implement anything. I'd like some kind of network-wide tracking/monitoring/benchmarking/testing/reporting/logging/error tracking program that is robust and easy to manage from a single location that I can use to troubleshoot and benchmark/test with and find network bottlenecks and errors.

I'll work up from any freeware utilities to paid-for services as well, I know something like this probably won't be free, but we can't afford enterprise class stuff either. I'd rather have a one-time purchase than have to pay every month as well. It needs to be out of the way, not very impacting on system resources or slow down PCs, and support mainly Windows XP and 7. We have a peer-to-peer network, no servers at the moment. And occasionally use wireless on laptops and cell phones/devices.

If possible, network mapping and being able to look for vulnerabilities in security would be great! If I could see at a glance things like what IPs are connected, with their computer names and such, how secure the wireless is, and more.


Thanks for any suggestions!

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  • Latest Post Latest Post by steven.dai

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A practical, low-cost way to get the baseline and long-term data you asked for is a three-tier approach: 1) a single always-on probe that runs lightweight active checks, 2) a small monitoring server for historical metrics and alerts, and 3) on-demand packet captures when an incident is reproducible. This keeps per-PC impact near zero, gives per-minute/hour trends for SLA-style comparison, and isolates whether Thunderbird timeouts are reachability/DNS/SMTP problems or something local to the PC. (OP: — this addresses the stability, packet-loss and per-host concerns you described; replies from and point in the same directions of log/metric and packet analysis.)

Use a tiny always-on box (Raspberry Pi or spare PC) to run continuous pings to your gateway and to public DNS, scheduled internet speed tests, and occasional LAN throughput tests. The common tools are a CLI speedtest client for scheduled ISP checks and iperf3 for controlled LAN benchmarks; log results to CSV or a time-series DB so you can chart before/after changes. Example cron line to append hourly CSV results from a CLI speed test:

0 * * * * /usr/local/bin/speedtest-cli --csv >> /var/log/speedtest.csv

This keeps measurements repeatable and low-impact. (raspberrypi.org)

For historical metrics and alerts, use a small monitoring server that supports SNMP/WMI and port checks so you can monitor Windows XP/7 hosts without heavy agents. An open-source server gives full control; a commercial product trades faster setup and GUI maps. Add checks for SMTP ports and DNS resolution timing to reproduce Thunderbird failures; run discovery scans for device inventory (be mindful of scan times and firewall alerts). (zabbix.com)

When a problem happens, capture the exchange with a packet sniffer (SMTP/DNS traffic) and correlate timestamps with your probe logs. Keep clocks synced (NTP), retain a few weeks of data for trend comparison, and alert on packet-loss or sustained high latency. Wireshark is the standard tool for detailed captures. (wireshark.org)

This approach is inexpensive, mostly one-time setup, and produces the objective before/after data you need to evaluate DOCSIS/router/switch changes.

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Member Avatar for suley04

Well, during the holidays between my 2nd and 3rd year at university, I did a voluntary placement in a national company called ItCampus. Cut a long story short; I was asked to program some servers to monitor the company's infrastructure both locally, and internationally. The software I used at the time was an Open Source software called "Nagios", which requires good programming skills in the "C" programming language.

However, after leaving the company and completing my degree, I have heard that a program called "Splunk" is supposed to be good for this kind of thing.

http://www.splunk.com/download/?ac=ga0508_s_splunk&_kk=splunk&_kt=0d0ee68f-00b5-441f-966d-e7b6c9228ad1&gclid=CJLp1uqY-qsCFYVP4QodzAErkw

You can download it for free (on a few different Operating Systems), and if you enter the relevant credentials after installation, you should essentially have it up and running pretty quickly. It is supposed to be quite user friendly, have regular updates, have an online community, provide detailed reports, etc.

However, I have never used it myself, as I have never needed to, but it might be worth a look.

Hope that helps. :)

Edited by suley04 because: n/a
Member Avatar for steven.dai

Colasoft Capsa also can be a good tool to troubleshot your network problems. www.colasoft.com

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