Pingplotter is a powerful monitoring and diagnostic tool for your network. This tool runs in the background collecting information about your network, and presents the same in a intuitive graphical format when you need. This information can be particularly useful for identifying and fixing problems in your network.
Though it is a useful tool, it comes with some shortcomings, especially when compared to other alternative choices available in the market. Some of the prominent shortcomings are:
- Many other tools are graphically more impressive than Pingplotter
- Doesn’t have a map interface
- Communication uses TCP port 9636 only
Due to these drawbacks, Pingplotter may not always be effective. But the good news is that there are other software that would do the job for you in a better way.
Here’s the Top Pingplotter Alternatives of 2018:
Let’s take a look at each of these tools in depth and have a look at their interfaces as well below.
1. TraceRoute NG
TraceRoute NG comes from SolarWinds, a company well-known for its top-quality monitoring and diagnostic tools. As with the SolarWinds’ line of products, this product performs accurate network path analysis.
Features
Below are its important features.
- It is a standalone tool
- Known for its fast network path analysis. In fact, it can return results within mere seconds.
- Uses TCP and ICMP probing
- Leverages SolarWinds powerful NetPath technology
- Delivers deep insights from source connection to any external destination service or site.
- Simple to use. All that you have to do is download this tool and click on the exe file to get started.
- Help screen gives detailed explanation on the different options available with TraceRoute NG
- Provides hop-by-hop path that can be particularly useful for identifying the root cause of a problem.
- Yields data through CLI single-path analysis
- Displays IP address, fully qualified domain name (FQDN), packet loss as a percentage, current latency, average latency, probe run time, probe type used and any issues such as path change or inability to reach a destination. This information is comprehensive and can help to detect issues quickly.
- Works for networks of all sizes.
- Detects path changes immediately
- Crates a text log file for easy reference
- Supports IPv4 and IPv6.
- Supports continuous probing, so you can always stay on top of what’s going on.
Pricing
This tool is 100% FREE
Download
https://www.solarwinds.com/free-tools/traceroute-ng/registration
2. WinMTR
WinMTR is a diagnostic tool that combines the functions of a traceroute and ping program into the same software. MTR stands for My traceroute, though it was originally named Matt’s traceroute to honor Matt Kimball, the person who originally wrote this program. In fact, this program is a Windows alternate to Matt’s traceroute that was available only on Unix/Linux.
Features
The features of WinMTR are:
- MTR is based on ICMPO Time Exceeded packets or ICMP Echo Reply packets.
- It also supports UDP mode that sends UDP packets with TTL field in the header.
- Supports IPv6 as well.
- Displays a list of routers traversed by the packet, average time for the round-trip and packet loss of each router.
- Helps users to identify links between two routers
- Makes it easy to identify network overuse problems.
- Works by keeping track of response times of the packet hops along the path.
- Ideal for 32-bit and 64-bit Windows versions.
- It is an open-source and cross-platform tool.
- Installation is simple and the user interface is intuitive.
- “Clear history” features removes all the hosts that the program has traced previously.
- Ideal if you want to document or file a complaint with your ISP.
- Works well with command line.
Pricing
It is licensed under GPL v2, which means, it is free to use.
Download
You can download it from http://winmtr.net/download-winmtr/
3. SmokePing
SmokePing is a tool that keeps track of network latency.
Features
SmokePing comes with the following features.
- Its interactive graph explorer gives you a visual representation of your network.
- Supports a wide range of latency measurement plug-ins.
- Has a master slave system that makes it ideal for a distributed system.
- The alerting system is highly configurable.
- Offers live latency charts to give you a real-time view of your network performance.
- You can run it in debug mode at any time to identify any problems associated with it.
- It detects issues automatically as they happen.
- Provides support for your own mail server
- Stores issues and keeps the history, so you can view it at any time or even analyze them later.
Pricing
It is 100% Free
Download
SmokePing can be downloaded from https://oss.oetiker.ch/smokeping/pub/
4. Open Visual Traceroute
Open Visual Traceroute is an open-source and cross platform traceroute software and packet sniffer. It was created by Leo Lewis.
Features
Open Visual Traceroute comes with the following features.
- Comes with 3D and 2D map visualization to give you information and analysis just the way you want.
- You can export the data from this tool to an image or text
- It also gives you a Gantt view of the data for quick interpretation and easy analysis.
- Works well across multiple operating systems like Windows, Linux and Unix.
- You can easily plot the network traffic on a 3D map.
- Allows to start with a Whois option
- It analyzes your network, measures packet’s transit delays and display network route.
- It is fast and convenient.
- Easy to install.
Pricing
This is also 100% Free
Download
You can download Open Visual traceroute from https://sourceforge.net/projects/openvisualtrace/files/latest/download
5. MTR
MTR stands for My Traceroute. It was originally called Matt’s Traceroute, after the person who developed it. Essentially, this program combines the functionalities of traceroute and ping programs.
Features
Here’s a look at some of the important features of MTR.
- You can specify the destination host.
- As soon as it starts, this program will analyze the network connection between the host on which MTR runs and the destination host.
- It sends running statistics about each machine as the probe keeps happening.
- It is compatible with most major operating systems.
- It can limit the number of hops a particular packet takes in a network to reach the destination.
- Supports IPv6
- Setup and use is simple and easy
Pricing
This tool is open-source and is free to use.
Download
You can download from https://github.com/traviscross/mtr
Conclusion
In short, the above alternatives to PingPlotter can give you more options and flexibility than PingPlotter itself. So, the next time you want to avoid the shortcomings of PingPlotter, try one of these that are listed above. Many of them have very similar functions that PingPlotter have but with some added benefits.
