Ping Tracer - an internet connection monitoring tool

bp2008

bp2008

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Mar 10, 2014
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I would like to share with everyone a simple network monitoring tool that I have written.

https://pingtracer.codeplex.com/

Its primary goal is to help identify the source of internet connectivity problems. In its most basic usage, it can monitor any network host that responds to echo requests (a.k.a. "pings"). Each ping response time is graphed so you can visually identify the time and severity of any network problems.

But when there is a connectivity problem, ping response graphs from a single internet address can only tell you so much. The real benefit comes when you have it "graph every node leading to the destination". In this mode, it will perform a traceroute operation to discover every pingable router in the path between your PC and the target, and then all these routers are monitored and graphed simultaneously.

For example, consider this screenshot which I captured while monitoring my network path to a random google web server. This is a fairly normal graph showing two problematic events:

YjmRF8k.png


The first event is represented by the yellow lines in the third graph. This is one of my ISP's routers that regularly shows elevated ping response times in spikes just like that. The issue is isolated to that one network node, and does not affect any of the following nodes in a measurable way. Therefore it is of no concern to me.

I triggered the second event by running an internet speed test. The first node is my home router on a gigabit LAN, which explains why its response times were not affected. However for every node beyond that, you see elevated ping response times (yellow) and a bit of packet loss (red) all occurring at the same time. This indicates that my internet connection was congested during the speed test. (big surprise!)

From time to time, other internet routers out in the wild will show signs of trouble. This manifests as elevated ping response times and/or packet loss starting at one node and extending to all following nodes. So when you are working remotely with remote desktop, or playing an online game and experience lag or connection loss, it is really handy to have this tool open so you can see if the problem is on your end, at the remote end, or somewhere in between.
 
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Very nice tool bp2008!

If you're still working on this, I would love to see a history scrolling feature, and possibility to export more than just the current "screenshot". I would love to monitor connection for more than few hours and still see the results.
 
I agree some longer-term monitoring, import/export features would be nice, but I am happy enough with the current functionality that none of those things are a priority for me.

If you want better long-term monitoring, there are other tools out there, like PingPlotter - PingPlotter - Pinpoint Network Problems. It is not free, but it is loaded with features and functionality that my Ping Tracer will never have. I don't know of any other good free monitoring tools which is why I wrote this one in the first place.
 
Thanks for the reply, in the past I've been using SmokePing, free and featurerich, just a pain to install and configure.

I still think this will be a nice add to my toolbox, thanks.
 
So ...

I uploaded an update today. You can now scroll the graphs as far back as you like and there is a timeline at the bottom to keep track of what you are looking at and give a frame of reference to screenshots.
 
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Very cool tool thanks, though after you mentioned it I many end up with PingPlotter Pro just for the multi target tabs as I have need to ping several locations at once when I have issues.

Appreciate your post on your solution though, it brought my need for a solution to the front of my mind at least!
 
PingPlotter is a very useful piece of software. They also have kind of a spin-off program, MultiPing, that lets you monitor multiple hosts without using tabs. But it sacrifices the automatic traceroute so it is good for an entirely different purpose.
 
Since I came up with another program to help me with pinging, I might aswell share it here aswell (sorry to use your thread bp2008):

https://code.google.com/p/paping/
paping is a cross-platform TCP port tester/pinger. So instead of the original ping (which is blocked on Windows 7 firewall by default btw), you can actually ping ports. I've found this very useful for troubleshooting purposes.
 
Cool. I noticed PingPlotter can do this as well, but never tried it. I wonder how the response times and packet loss counts compare with standard ping. I think TCP connections are generally given a higher priority by routers, than standard pings.
 
I have just uploaded a minor update to PingTracer that makes graph scrolling smoother. The upper graphs were unfairly getting higher priority than the lower graphs, so if you scrolled too fast the lower graphs would not redraw in a timely manner. I fixed that.
 
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bp2008 said:
Cool. I noticed PingPlotter can do this as well, but never tried it. I wonder how the response times and packet loss counts compare with standard ping. I think TCP connections are generally given a higher priority by routers, than standard pings.
Click to expand...

By default ICMP has no lower priority then other traffic. Some devices/admins might give it lower priority if if the load gets high.
 
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