An Overview of Networking Monitoring Tools

Hello and welcome to TrainSignal. I'm

Veronica Henry, and you're watching an

overview of network monitoring tools.

In this lesson, we'll talk a little

bit about the concept of network

monitoring and then move right into a

discussion and demonstration of some of

the most popular network monitoring tools.

Network administrators will be

most familiar with the concept of

network monitoring, but for those of you

who are newbies, network monitoring is

simply a subset of the network

management tasks that administrators

perform on a daily basis.

It basically tracks your network

activity for anything that might

indicate you have a problem, whether it

be immediate or an indicator of a

potential future problem. Monitoring is

often performed on a dedicated machine

attached to your network, usually using a

GUI application of some sort or

another. But network monitoring can also

be performed from the command line with

simple tools that reveal a plethora of

information. So now we'll dive into

examples of the most commonly used

network monitoring tools.

Packet Internet Groper, or ping for

short, is probably the most recognized

network troubleshooting tool, though

probably not by its longer name. When you

have a problem with network connectivity

issues, ping is usually the first tool

that's pulled out of the arsenal. It

tests connectivity by sending and

monitoring ICMP echo requests that are

used to determine if another computer is

available for communications on a

TCP/IP network.

In order to use ping, you only

need to know either the NetBIOS name, the

DNS name, or the IP address of the other

computer. And the syntax is very simple,

it's just ping followed by the name of

the computer.

So for example, if you wanted to

test connectivity to Google, you would

type in ping space

www.google.com. Let's go to a Windows

command prompt and try this out, though

you could technically do it from a Linux

terminal window as well. The result will

be the same.

Okay, again, from the command

prompt, and this is just the Windows

command prompt that you access by typing

in cmd.

Let's try typing in ping.

We'll type in www.google.com

and hit enter.

Now what you should get back is what you

see here on the screen. You have a reply

with some bytes with some time and some

other statistics. That means that the

connection between your computer over to

Google is functioning properly, okay? Now

let's go back to the presentation and

talk about what to do if ping doesn't work.

If you don't get a reply from the

ping command, and after you've checked

things like the client software

configuration, then you can use the

tracert or traceroute

commands. These commands allow you to

check the network path between two

computers. All you need is the name or IP

address of the destination

computer. And the syntax is simple like

ping and simply tracert or traceroute

followed by that name of the computer, so

let's go back to our terminal and give

it a try.

Okay, back at our Windows command

prompt. Let's try typing in t r a c e r t

space www.google.com

and hit enter.

And what we should see is the

route in terms of hops

between your computer and the

destination computer.

And as you can see here, it

tells you that it's going to do a

maximum of 30 hops.

And so what you will see is some times

and actual path, again, that your data is taking.

Okay, now that that's complete,

let's head back to the presentation.

Our next tool is called ipconfig.

It's used to display and modify

current TCP/IP configuration information

like the IP address, your subnet mask, the

default gateway, and the DNS server

address. And there's several switches

that can be used to tailor its

functionality. Let's go back to our

command prompt and try this one out.

Okay, back at our command prompt.

Let's try out our next command. Just type

in i p c o n f i g

and hit enter.

I'm going to scroll up so you can

see all of the content.

And from the top, you can see

that we have the ethernet adapter

information here including your IP

address and default gateway.

Then we have some information

for VMware since we do have that

installed on this system.

And other information, though

generally, you'll spend all of your time

concentrated in this space.

Okay, let's go back to the

presentation and take a look at the

linux version of this tool next.

Ifconfig is the Linux equivalent

of ipconfig, and again, it's used to view

or change your network interface card

configuration information. The syntax is

either typing in ifconfig by itself or

ifconfig followed by the interface

or ifconfig followed by the

interface and the new setting if you

want to make a change.

There's one difference between ipconfig

and ifconfig. The Linux version

will not display your default gateway

address, so in that case, you can use the

route command with no options to display

this information.

Let's go over to a Fedora Linux virtual

machine, and in a terminal window, give

this command a try.

Okay, from Fedora Linux, in order to

open up a terminal window, click on

applications, system tools, and

terminal. And from this point, let's try

our command. Just type in i f c o n f i g

and hit enter.

And as you can see, we have

hardware address information, we have IP address,

broadcast address, and even subnet mask.

And we have the same information for the

loop back address. Now let's try typing

in the route command.

So simply type in r o u t e and hit

enter, and again, this information

displays our default gateway

address, okay? Let's head back to our

presentation and take a look at our next tool.

Our next tool is called nslookup,

and it's used to verify your computer

can communicate with its DNS server. When

you use this command at the command

prompt, it should respond with the IP

address of one or more computers if you

see multiple IP addresses, this means

that that site is configured to host

content across multiple web servers. The

syntax is nslookup followed by host or

the fully qualified domain name.

Okay, back at our command prompt.

Let's type in nslookup

followed by www.google.com

and hit enter.

And again, as you see, we have a

response with IP addresses. And if you

recall from the slide, if we have

multiple IP addresses, that just means

that the site is configured to host

content across multiple web servers,

okay? Let's head back to the presentation.

Next, we have the net

command which allows you to get specific

information and perform several

functions from the command line. This

command has several parameters that you

can use in conjunction to get the

information that you want again or to

perform a specific action. The first

parameter is continue which is used to

restart a pause service. Then you have

pause which, of course, will pause a

service. Print displays your print jobs

and queues. Session will list or disconnect

sessions between computers. Share will

list the shares on your local computer

and also can be used to share local

resources. Start will list the running

services and can also be used to start a

service. Use or mount connects to a

remote computer.

Mount is the Linux command

that's used to access NFS shared volumes.

And finally, view will list computers on

the network.

Okay, back at our Windows command

prompt. Let's just type in net space

start, and this will list all the

services that are running on the

computer. Hit enter.

And we had a pretty long list

which probably scrolled by, but as you

can see here, we just have a list of the

services that are running on the computer.

And if you wanted to pause a

service, you would just type in net pause.

If you wanted to start one, you'd do net

start followed by the service name,

okay? We'll head back to the

presentation, we just have two more tools

to review.

If you happen to be running NetBIOS

on your machine, you can use the nbstat

command to display NetBIOS over

TCP/IP statistics. This includes the NetBIOS

name tables and name cache.

And this command can be used to

recover or correct NetBIOS name cache entries.

And our last tool is netstat

which displays a list of computers

active incoming and outgoing TCP/IP

connections. This is available in both

Windows and Linux, and your output will

include local and remote computers IP

addresses, port numbers associated with

each computer, and the state of the

connection, whether it's established or

closed. Let's go back to our command

prompt and try this out.

Okay, back at the prompt. Let's type

in netstat, n e t s t a t. And hit enter.

And what you can see, again, is the list

of the incoming and outgoing connections.

And you see the IP address, you see

foreign address information, and you also

see the state. You see established and

close wait for some of the states here.

Okay, that concludes our review of

network monitoring tools. Let's go over

what we've learned on the next slide

back at the presentation.

In this video, we learned

about the concept of network monitoring

and how it is used to track things like

network performance and identify issues

before they happen.

Then we moved on to cover network

troubleshooting tools like ping which

test connectivity, tracert and traceroute

which can tell you the path your

data follows, then we had ipconfig and

ifconfig to list the details about your

TCP/IP configuration information,

nslookup to list host, the net command to

look at various data and mount drives,

route which tells you your default

gateway, nbstat which displays net files

over TCP/IP statistics, and finally

netstat which displays a list of your

computers active incoming and outgoing

TCP/IP connections.

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