There are many internet speed testers available ranging from the free to the hundreds of dollars. But, when it comes to network performance testing tools that is an entirely different story. At InternetTesters we put together a comparison and review of budget and premium real time and non-real time online network performance testing tools.
Network performance tools enable you to test, analyze and troubleshoot your network in order to optimize it. It is the right choice when you need to test throughput, end-to-end performance, quality of experience (QoE), video quality grading (VQG) and network latency.
Network Performance Monitor
SolarWinds® Network Performance Monitor (NPM), the company’s flagship product, is an excellent tool to monitor and manage the entire network infrastructure, which covers all devices, applications, and users in a network. This tool offers visual NetFlow analysis and includes latency testing features. With this tool, you can check on all devices on the network, discover slow segments, and get recommendations to fix problems. With NPM, admins can spot congestion on ports and identify paths and servers with overloaded CPUs. They can also get alerts to resolve networking issues. Furthermore, it’s easy to get started with NPM, as SolarWinds offers a 30-day fully functional free trial for evaluation.
Paessler Router Traffic Grapher (PRTG)
Paessler Router Traffic Grapher (PRTG) is another comprehensive bandwidth monitoring tool that allows admins to view network patterns and consolidate alerts at a centralized location. The auto-discovery feature of this tool helps admins scan the entire network and discover new systems or changes to the network. It’s easy to view the performance of your network in real-time with color-coded maps and a robust dashboard system.
NetScanTools
NetScanTools is one of the most cost-effective and affordable sets of 50 network management tools and utilities available for Windows-based systems. Available in Pro, Basic, and LE packages, NetScanTools collects information automatically and presents it using automated reports for a detailed view.
Accedian
Accedian Skylight is a unified enterprise network, cloud, and application performance management solution. The product combines network flow monitoring, real-time application transaction decoding, and end-user experience tracking to generate performance data. With Skylight, users can monitor traffic from both physical or virtual environments (including the cloud) and analyze OSI Layer 2 through Layer 7 network traffic in real-time. Skylight can be deployed through either a virtual or hardware-based appliance.
AppNeta
AppNeta Performance Manager allows IT teams to monitor end-user experience across their cloud, network, and applications. It operates on a four-dimensional approach to monitoring, with capabilities working together to analyze usage and performance across networks and applications. AppNeta offers a wide range of graphics and reporting to deliver greater analytical insights to users. The vendor also provides specialized monitoring solutions for VoIP, UCaaS, and DNS systems, as well as monitoring for cloud deployments.
Auvik
Auvik is easy-to-use cloud-based networking management and monitoring software — without the hassle. By automating and simplifying network management, Auvik helps rocket an IT team’s efficiency and capacity, while protecting the business from network risk. Go beyond NetFlow to easily identify who’s on the network, what they’re doing, and where their traffic is going with Auvik TrafficInsights.
Acunetix
Acunetix Online includes a fully automated network vulnerability scanner that detects and reports on over 50,000 known network vulnerabilities and misconfigurations.
It discovers open ports and running services; assesses the security of routers, firewalls, switches, and load balancers; tests for weak passwords, DNS zone transfer, badly configured Proxy Servers, weak SNMP community strings and TLS/SSL ciphers, among others.
It integrates with Acunetix Online to provide a comprehensive perimeter network security audit on top of the Acunetix web application audit.
WAN Killer By SolarWinds
SolarWinds offers several types of network-related tools. It’s Engineer’s Toolset includes almost all tools required for network testing and comes as one complete package which allows network monitoring, diagnostics, network discovery tools.
It is a network traffic generator tool and lets user test network performance for a specific WAN in a controlled test environment. This tool allows testing network traffic threshold and load balancing.
Datadog
Datadog Network Performance Monitoring tool can track the performance of on-premise and cloud-based networks with a unique, tag-based approach. You will be able to breakdown the network traffic between hosts, containers, services, or any other tag in Datadog.
If you combine flow-based NPM with metric-based Network Device Monitoring then you can get complete visibility into network traffic, infrastructure metrics, traces, and logs—all in one place.
It visually maps traffic flow in an interactive map to help identify traffic bottlenecks and any downstream effects. It is easy to navigate and use, allowing you to see metrics like volume and retransmits without writing queries.
It can correlate network traffic data with relevant application traces, host metrics, and logs, to unify troubleshooting into one platform.
Obkio
Obkio is a simple network performance monitoring solution that allows users to continuously monitor the health of their network and core business applications to improve the end-user experience.
Obkio’s sleek and user-friendly software application diagnoses the causes of intermittent VoIP, video, and applications slowdown in seconds – because nothing is more frustrating than wasting time due to a poor connection.
Deploy network performance monitoring Agents at strategic locations in your company’s offices or network destinations to easily identify the source of a system failure so you can quickly apply the corrective measures before it affects your end-users.
Intruder
Intruder is a powerful cloud-based network vulnerability scanner that helps you to find the cybersecurity weaknesses in your most exposed systems to avoid costly data breaches. It is the perfect Network Testing Tool.
There are more than 9,000 security checks available and a few among them include identifying Application Bugs, CMS issues, Missing patches, Configuration weaknesses, etc.
Intruder is a perfect security solution for companies of all sizes. It helps to save your time and reduce friction with the development process. It also integrates with AWS, GCP, and Azure.
A free trial is available for 30 days. There are also several pricing plans available to cater to the needs of businesses of all sizes.
Conclusion
You have good reasons to do network performance testing. You need to know how fast your application is executing under different loads. You are interested in how performance varies over time. You want to know if any bugs were introduced while you implemented a new feature. And perhaps, sometimes, you just want to compare the performance of your application against that of another and see who’s getting ahead and by how much.