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Network Monitoring Tool

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A funny thing happened on the way to the 21st century packet switched communications that we know as the Internet. It is extremely resilient in the presence of a failure. However it is also susceptible to massive unintended consequences because of its ability to be reconfigured instantly. As a result your service may degrade when least expected. This may be fine for a traditional management information system like banking, e-commerce, or a video streaming service with a 30 second buffer, but it is unacceptable for real time systems that must have messages appear at a destination within a specific time or the system will fail. These real time systems are found in process and command and control applications. The problems surface when these command and control systems detect the network dropout but the service providers claim all is fine. However all is not fine. This is a finger pointing exercise and only a third party simple network monitoring tool can help to resolve the conflict.

NMT lets you monitor the state of your network by keeping it very simple and pinging a remote host. You decide on the monitoring criteria. When the criteria is not met the ping event is logged. You decide on the criticality of the events by using different colors. All ping events are logged and accessible via a link. The current event status is maintained and accessible via a link. You can run multiple instances of NMT to ping multiple commutations paths in the system. Remember, just because you can ping a host it does not mean the host is up and running. This checks the communications connection to the host over long periods of time like overnight. It is simple and easy to use so that anyone can monitor their network and detect if it winks out for a few seconds.

Use the control panel to make your settings and start NMT.

  1. Press the submit button to capture the settings.
  2. Once settings are reasonable begin a small ping session.
  3. When the settings are mature increase the session count to run overnight.
  4. Review the screen and logs the next morning.
  5. Uncheck the ping run options and press the submit button.
  6. Save this off as a new template in the NMT template folder.

There are 2 ways to ping using NMT. The first and preferred method is to use the Perl ping. This uses a Perl library with various options to ping the remote destination. In this case the TCP option is the most reasonable. It also takes the longest time because the remote uses its echo port to respond. The second approach is to use the DOS ping.

You may be wondering why use NMT if you can just ping from a DOS window. This tool provides structure, offers reasonable options, and saves off the results automatically in common areas. It also uses colors to help visualize the results. It may not seem like much until you need to run this 24/7 to make sure your links are not winking out for a few seconds.

The biggest difference between the Perl TCP and DOS ICMP ping is the time. That time difference might actually be the reason your real time system is having problems but everyone else is claiming the network is fine, after all the ICMP ping shows no evidence of a problem. With the new insights from NMT there may be other evidence that suggest a network problem.

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Book Information


Settings

Name Analysis File
Host
Samples (apache server timeout is 3,600,000 sec in conf file)

Ping timeout seconds (.2, .5, 1, 2, etc)
Ping rate in seconds (1, 2, 5, etc) Randomize (0 to the set value)

Quick checks: Trace Once Hops Netstat Ping DOS Options (-l size bytes)

Timeout Criteria:
.
BLACK WHITE RED GREEN BLUE YELLOWGRAY MARRON OLIVE NAVY PURPLE LIME AQUA TEAL ORANGE FUCHIA SILVER

- - Isolated Failure Event Color
A Consecutive Failures Criteria Color
B Consecutive Failures Criteria Color
C Consecutive Failures Criteria Color
D - Possible Comm System Failure Color

Ping Type:

DOS ICMP (doswin goes up/dwn no port)

Perl TCP default UDP UDP Bytes Stream External ICMP (UNIX root) Port

Select to run:

Ping Loop Trace Loop

Show Live Data Here

      Stop Now

version: 1.8