Network Monitoring and Troubleshooting Utilities

To properly manage and monitor your Windows network, you need to become familiar with the tools required to manage, monitor, and troubleshoot problems. Let us take a look at some of the basic network utilities.

• Ping —This is one of the most basic, yet most useful tool you will use when troubleshooting server problems. The ping utility does just that it pings a given server name or IP address to see if the host is responding on the network. If a server fails to respond to a ping, it may be off-line.

• PathPing —PathPing provides a more in-depth ping test that not only tests to see if the host is alive, but also displays the IP paths that the ping has gone through, such as network routers. PathPing also gathers statistics related to the ping test.

• NSLookup —NSLookup is a key DNS name resolution testing utility. The NSLookup command allows you to send queries to DNS Servers to ensure that they respond and provide the correct result to the query.

• Network Monitor (netmon) —Network Monitor allows you to capture network traffic and packets on your network and analyze them. Network Monitor is a great utility to understand which servers talk to each other and what protocols and ports they use to do so.