Independent reviews for sysadmins
Find the bad hop. Keep the evidence.
“The network is slow” is a complaint, not a diagnosis. Scan 365 Pro reviews the tools that turn it into one — traceroute loggers, throughput testers, packet analysers and reachability checks — and judges each by the evidence it hands you, and how long it takes to get it.
- 1gw.office.lan10.20.0.10.0%0.9 ms
- 2cpe-edge100.64.12.10.0%7.8 ms
- 3isp-agg-1198.51.100.90.0%9.4 ms
- 4isp-core-2198.51.100.3438.0%11.2 msloss stops here — later hops are clean
- 5ix-peer203.0.113.50.0%12.0 ms
- 6cdn-edge203.0.113.770.0%14.1 ms
- 7app.example.net192.0.2.100.0%14.6 ms
Independent. We are not Pingman Tools, Obkio, Microsoft or any other vendor here. The reviews are ours; the trademarks are theirs.
No files on this domain. Nothing here can be run or installed. Every product link opens the maker’s own page.
Your network only. Every test we describe assumes a network you administer, or written permission from its owner.
Three lines
Pick the line that matches the ticket
Each category is drawn as a line and each tool as a stop on it. A ringed stop is an interchange: that tool also appears on another line, shown by the coloured pips beneath its name.
Latency line6 stops
- PingPlotterAlso on Throughput line and Reachability line
- mtrAlso on Throughput line
- SmokePingAlso on Reachability line
- Obkio Network Performance MonitoringAlso on Throughput line
- Angry IP ScannerAlso on Reachability line
- WiresharkAlso on Throughput line and Reachability line
Throughput line6 stops
- iPerf3
- WiresharkAlso on Latency line and Reachability line
- TCPViewAlso on Reachability line
- Obkio Network Performance MonitoringAlso on Latency line
- PingPlotterAlso on Latency line and Reachability line
- mtrAlso on Latency line
Reachability line6 stops
- Angry IP ScannerAlso on Latency line
- LizardSystems Network Scanner
- TCPViewAlso on Throughput line
- SmokePingAlso on Latency line
- PingPlotterAlso on Latency line and Throughput line
- WiresharkAlso on Throughput line and Latency line
Guides
When the ticket says…
Step-by-step procedures for the situations that fill a sysadmin’s queue, each ending with something you can attach to the ticket.
- Check which hosts came back after a power or switch outageSnapshot your authorised subnets before a maintenance window, rescan after the power or switch outage, and diff the lists to find hosts that stayed down.
- Find the hop where packet loss really starts — and when it's only ICMP deprioritisationA step-by-step method for locating the hop where packet loss begins, telling real loss from router rate limiting, and building evidence an ISP will accept.
- Measure real LAN and WAN throughput with iPerf3How to run iPerf3 server and client tests, read TCP and UDP results, test both directions, and avoid the mistakes that make a 10G link look like 900 Mbit/s.
- Find which Windows process owns a port or a connectionIdentify the process behind a listening port or unexpected connection on Windows with TCPView, Tcpvcon, netstat and PowerShell, plus the PID traps.
What each tool hands you
The evidence index
All 9 tools, alphabetically, with the artefact you can forward once you have used them.
| Tool | Lines | Licence | Evidence it produces |
|---|---|---|---|
| Angry IP ScannerAnton Keks | Open source | A CSV/TXT/XML list of which addresses answered, with ping time and hostname | |
| iPerf3ESnet | Open source | Per-interval throughput, retransmits and UDP loss/jitter figures, with JSON output | |
| LizardSystems Network ScannerLizardSystems | Paid for business | An HTML/TXT/XML export of hosts, their shares and read/write access | |
| mtrBitWizard / open-source maintainers | Open source | A plain-text report (--report) of loss and latency per hop, easy to paste into a ticket | |
| Obkio Network Performance MonitoringObkio | SaaS | Agent-to-agent loss, latency, jitter and VoIP quality history across sites | |
| PingPlotterPingman Tools | Commercial | Timeline graphs of latency and loss per hop that can be shared or exported | |
| SmokePingTobias Oetiker | Open source | Weeks of latency and loss history drawn as "smoke" graphs, one per target | |
| TCPViewMicrosoft Sysinternals | Freeware | A live list of every TCP/UDP endpoint with its owning process, savable as text | |
| WiresharkWireshark Foundation | Open source | A pcap file plus expert-info and TCP analysis (retransmissions, zero windows, resets) |
Head to head
When two tools both look right
How we judge
Two questions for every tool
What evidence does it produce that you could hand to an ISP, a vendor or the colleague who owns the firewall? And how long, starting cold from the vendor’s own site, until you have it? We answer both from vendor documentation, licence and pricing pages, release notes and public trials, weighed against what working admins report once a tool has lived on their network for a while. Feature counts come second.
Edited byHusanjon RuzalievCorrections: editor@scan365pro.ink