Murf: No red was recorded....but a little off topic software with a great story is posted here.
Net.Medic/ It's Just What The Doctor Ordered
vitalsigns.com
How many times have you sat impatiently watching your browser on the "World Wide Wait," wondering whether the slug-like speed of your download was due to your Internet connection or Internet service provider (ISP), a problem with the accessed site, a misconfigured router or just network congestion? VitalSigns Software's Net.Medic is a terrific Internet/intranet diagnostic product designed to find the answer, and it is a great balm for the ills of the iWay.
This inexpensive Windows95 and Windows NT package is what VitalSigns calls a "browser companion," since it's designed to work closely with either Netscape Navigator or Microsoft Internet Explorer 3.0 or later. It comes with an impressive array of sophisticated network
diagnostic tools and a comprehensive battery of reports that you will
find invaluable. Because it's so easy to use, nontechnical users will be able to use most features without difficulty.
A few other general-purpose Internet diagnostic browser companions
(Starfish Software's InternetMeter Inlay), Internet/ISP monitoring
programs (such as iMeter available on Intel's FTP server), high-powered analyzers and other specialized tools are available. However, nothing I have seen has both the comprehensive breadth of functionality and the ease of use of Net.Medic.
Upon Opening the Kit Net.Medic is strong medicine, but it really goes
down easy. After a no-brainer installation, Net.Medic opens into a
vertically paned "dashboard" window, which is divided clearly by
function. Individual items-such as modem compression and throughput,
connect time, CPU load and percentage of browser cache hits-are
displayed in an easy-to-read format. Separate panes show the accessed
remote site and the routers located between the two. You can turn each dashboard pane on or off, make panes float on top of your desktop, or snap one directly onto the browser. Panes graphically display data, such as individual page loading time, average throughput, peak throughput, load estimates and daily percentage of network traffic versus server load.
A color- coded general "health" estimate is displayed for each
component, letting you quickly focus on problem areas.
While the real-time display panels are very useful, Net.Medic really
shines as a diagnostic tool with its thorough statistical reporting
capabilities. As you browse, Net.Medic constantly collects information in the background about connection quality, network slowdowns and a host of other environmental and functional characteristics. The raw data is fed through a statistical inference engine, so the longer you browse, the more accurate the reports become. Some of the reports are session-based (connect time, receive and transmit throughput), but most are comparative statistics collected across multiple sessions (delays and minimum/maximum/ average speed for the most frequently visited sites modem errors, network traffic and errors, and intranet router load, among many others). Some reports are broken down by time of day (such as
average Internet/intranet/ISP load), providing a good measure of daily usage patterns.
Bedside Manner Net.Medic's user interface is full of thoughtful features. The small logo that appears on the task bar changes color from its usual green to yellow or red, alerting you of trouble even if Net.Medic's dashboard is closed or hidden. The visual design of the dashboard panels is clear, uncluttered, easy to read and graphically elegant.
VitalSigns says it wants to be a "good network citizen," so Net.Medic is not just a graphical front end for ping and traceroute, which generate traffic on their own. Instead, Net.Medic acts as a kind of mini-analyzer, parsing the packets that come back to it. It uses passive monitoring and packet-flow- analysis techniques to take data such as time-to-live (TTL) fields (to calculate number of hops between host and browser), interpacket gap times, HTTP response time, and differences between
HTTP and IP response times to statistically infer its conclusions.
VitalSigns' Web site has excellent links to some of the academic and
commercial network research on which it bases its diagnostic wizardry.
I tested Net.Medic's abilities in three environments: a T1 connection
through a corporate intranet, a standard 28.8-Kbps modem to a nearby
ISP, and a Ricochet wireless modem through Ricochet's access service
(top speed about 38.4 Kbps). In all three situations, Net.Medic correctly diagnosed numerous problems, including intranet IP errors, excessive host load, Domain Name Service (DNS) servers failing and hung connections. It offered to correct those problems where it could
(including modem port speed and compression optimization and DNS
setup). When Net.Medic couldn't provide a direct solution (excessive
remote server load, for instance), it offered to automatically send an e-mail notifying the Webmaster at the problem site.
I have very few quibbles with Net.Medic. Some minor functional
problems I found and reported in my early beta copy were completely fixed a week later in the next beta. I would like to see the ability to break down more of the reports by time of day, and further subdivide some of the time-of-day reports by weekend and/or weekday categories.
Test results were seldom off. In one instance, Net.Medic recommended
that because of CPU load, I might want to upgrade my laptop (a
133-MHz Pentium), but generally the entire battery of tests Net.Medic
ran during my testing were consistently accurate. |
