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 TC

cpip

Network in order to use ping you only

need to know either the net bio 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 bites 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 you can use the

Tracer t or Tracer route

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 Tracer t or Tracer route

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 TR r a c 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 ip

config 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 IP Co n

fig 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 if config is the Linux equivalent

of IP config and again it's used to view

or change your network interface card

configuration information the syntax is

either typing an if config by itself or

I have config followed by the interface

or I have config followed by the

interface and the new setting if you

want to make a

change there's one difference between ip

config and if config 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 if n

fig and hit

enter and as you can see we have

Hardware information we have IP address

broadcast address and even subet mask

and we have the same information for the

loop back address now let's try typing

in the route

command simply type in r u t 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 NS lookup

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 NS lookup followed by host or

the fully qualified domain

name okay back at our Command Prompt

let's type in NS

lookup 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 cues 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 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 net

bios on your machine you can use the NB

stat command to display net bios over

tcpip statistics this includes the net

bios name tables and name

cache and this command can be used to

recover or correct net bios name cache

entries and our last tool is netstat

which displays a list of computers

active incoming and outgoing tcpip

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 NE St a 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

closed weight 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 Tracer T and Tracer

route which can tell you the path your

data follows then we had ip config and

if config to list the details about your

tcpip configuration information and let

look up to list host and N command to

look at various data and mounts drives

route which tells you your default

gateway and bat which displays net FES

over tcpip statistics and finally

netstat which displays a list of your

computers active incoming and outgoing

tcpip

connections we at train signal are

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video