MxToolbox in Austin supports global Internet operations by providing what they describe as free, fast and accurate network diagnostic and lookup tools. The vendor boasts millions of technology professionals using their tools to help diagnose and resolve a wide range of infrastructure issues.
N/A
PingPlotter
Score 9.3 out of 10
N/A
PingPlotter is a graphical traceroute and ping tool that visualizes network performance in a way that makes identifying the source of problems quicker and easier for everyone from online gamers and video streamers to VoIP admins and IT pros. Features for remote deployment, network monitoring, scripting, and a web interface are included along with several additional capabilities.
We had a scenario where one company could not send us an email, our spam filter was unable to resolve and therefore deemed it greylisted. With MXToolBox I was able to determine their DMARC was not set up correctly with their provider causing this and helped them see the reason for failure with a short report from MXToolBox, giving them some guidance as to how to resolve it themselves.
It is well suited for performing monitoring and testing from a single device. It is less appropriate if you have to monitor from multiple different endpoints. That type of deployment would be more of an enterprise application. If you are looking for an end user monitoring solution then PingPlotter is the one for you.
Its a little confusing to see which targets are currently running pings and which ones are displayed in the plots.
Starting and stopping pings requires a right click and that would be better with a play/pause button I think.
Ability to drag and drop the graphs to reorder them.
more columns to show which targets are running and which are displayed. Currently this is done with symbols so you cant sort by just the running targets for example I've found.
I installed it and it just started working. I realized I could then tweak it to show what I needed but didn't have to spend a long time configuring it before use, editing YAML files etc. Maybe that's fine for a network professional, but I only need this software if something goes wrong, and then need it to work quickly out of the box.
I have not had much contact with the PingPlotter support, only one time have I went to them and it was a positive experience. The questions I had were answered quickly and professionally. I have no issue with the experience I had with the Support team. This was from before and after the purchase of the product.
While I do not use other tools as this one provides everything i need. I find that MXToolbox provides a better experience through their clean UI, there is not a flood of popups, or other unrelated information that impacts the trustworthy nature of the web site. Other Solutions could learn from these guys on how to keep a tool clean and efficient.
A balance of a generic tool vs a network equipment product is necessary when investigating network incidents or disruptions. Need to train the engineer to use both tools to perform their analysis and to dive down to the issues as fast as they can. Experience with the tools will continue to play a part if we were to adopt PingPlotter