What tools are you guys using to qualify network bandwidth /throughput?

I'm not talking standard ISP “Speedtest” apps, but dedicated hardware or software solutions.

There are companies out there that produce software tools for intensive network troubleshooting but all seem to be based at enterprise networking and are therefore at enterprise price levels!!

I am looking at something more suited to small and high end residential networks.

we have various Fluke hardware for infrastructure and connectivity testing but nothing that load tests the network or can analyse existing traffic and bandwidth.

TIA, Nick

I’m facing the same dilemma. In my opinion PC or phone based tools are unreliable because we don’t have much control over their multitasking and this will undermine the resolution and repeatability of our tests. One approach that I think is viable is a Raspberry Pi based, dedicated tool. The hardware is inexpensive and accessible, allowing us to deploy probes at multiple sites for a period of days. Such tools might already exist. I haven’t researched this.

Learn how to use MikroTik. Setup one router as your remote server behind a gigabit link.

Then any other router You install at a clients site has a bandwidth test tool. Plug in the public IP of your server router and hit test.

Take a look at an open source software tool called iperf. You can run it on any hardware that will run a major Linux distribution. I run iperf on a cloud VM in order to run internet speed tests. It also works within a local network by testing between two iperf nodes.

We used to use Domotz running on either a raspberry pi or off of a luxul router. We thought it was a great product. It continuously scans the network for new devices or devices that disconnect, could run scheduled speed test, had built in troubleshooting tools for popular products like Sonos, nuvo, Control4 and onvif cameras and a lot more. Would let you remote in to devices with web servers without a vpn. We sold a few of them and we never had a issue with the actual product but the company is another story. If I remember correctly when we first started using them they charged $6 a month, which was great price. After a few months they swapped over to some kind of token system where you had to buy tokens and load them to your projects where 1 token=1 month. And they increased the price to $9 for a token. That was fine, still a great price for what it was. After a few more months they changed it again, this time they split the services up into basic plan and pro plan. I don’t remember what the services where in each one but the basic plan was pretty much stripped of most useful tools. Oh and the price went up, it was still $9 for basic plan but $15 for pro plan now. Well now they did away with the basic and pro plans and combined everything together in 1 plan for the price of $19 a month, but they offered a lifetime license you can buy from distributors. Well we bought a few lifetime licenses and after a few months we noticed that the projects that had lifetime licenses had expiration dates, after emailing them they said the lifetime license isn’t actually a lifetime license, it’s a 5 year license. All of these changes in the span of few years. Yea we finally had enough of them and stopped using them. Which is a shame because it really is a good product.

But anyways, we use OvrC Pro now that has almost all the same features as domotz

Sorry I probably didn’t make myself clear enough. It’s the internal network I want to run diagnostics on, not the internet bandwidth.

im looking for something that will prove throughput between devices, check overall network usage and headroom, identify bandwidth hungry devices, etc.

I will take a look at iperf and see what it’s capabilities are in a local LAN context.

thanks

IPerf just works between any two machines running IPerf. One attempts to read and write large files to/from the other and the speed is measured between the two. This is likely to be the underlying testing method used in a product like domotz or ovrc. This means you can run it between a couple of laptops on a local network to test wired and/or wireless speeds or you can run it on a cloud vm and use it to test internet speeds. Beware that you can chew through masses of bandwidth on a metered connection.

Seems like that's no different than just doing an FTP between two machines. Most FTP clients will show average BW for a transfer. But you need some big honking files for the jitter to settle. You still are at the mercy of the throughput of each individual node's ethernet adapter.

And, for multitasking computers, there can be some jitter and slowdowns associated with the operating system.