Packet Trap pt360 Tool suite is a Windows based free Network Diagnostic tools suite and a Network Monitoring tool. Packet Trap has a nice Dashboard with drag and drop dashboard components.
At the first look, Packet Trap is very impressive, simple, easy to use, easy to understand, simple and easy navigation and menu options. All the diagnostic tools are graphic and provides a great advantage as a one stop shop for most of the Network troubleshooting. What is even more impressive is that the monitoring system being integrated into a Network Diagnostic suite which allows an admin to monitor and troubleshoot all from one place and they all can export the results in nice HTML format.
The network diagnostic tools available in Packet Trap are
Ping Scan – To scan networks using ICMP
Enhanced Ping – Detailed reporting on Ping Time, Reponse time, Average response time, status and packet loss details.
Graphical Ping – Pings persistently and Graphs the response time in milliseconds over a period of time
DNS Audit – DNS Lookup for a host with simple lookup details
Whois Lookup
Port Scan for a given IP or a range of IPs
MAC Address Scan for a given IP or a range of IPs
SNMP Scan – Supports SNMPv1/2&3 thereby any platform that supports SNMP are supported
WMI Scan – Windows WMI support
Wake On LAN – Wake on LAN list of Hosts (hosts that support the option at the hardware level. For example, in BIOS for x86 systems)
TraceRoute – with response times and Packet Loss info
Traffic Jam – Traffic Generator on TCP and UDP ports with customisation options on the packet size, bandwidth
TFTP server
All the diagnostic tools are also available as individual downloads, if you do not want a host of these features on your system. Although, the fully loaded suite is certainly not bloated. There is also a commercial PRO version of this tool which extends support to
Cisco Config Management
Netflow Analyzer
Opensource tools integration (like Nagios & Cacti)
Remote TCP reset
Syslog server
Network Discovery
Encrypted Password vault
If I have to point and select the best possible feature, I would choose Wake On LAN feature which allows you to start a bunch of hosts which supports the feature. This can be of great help with remote access/administration when you need to start a PC which you know is shutdown. Departments may even adapt it for green policies. Also, all SNMP, Password and other credentials are stored in encrypted format on the disk.
Overall a great tool for simple network administration. If there is anything that one could call a downside it is that PacketTrap pt360 could have been Web-based Client-Server tool than desktop based. This would allow Small and Medium Networks and may be to a level Enterprise networks to adapt.
As a Network professional, I would personally recommend this product to my fellow professionals!!!
For more information and download, click here
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