Question What tools and software do y'all use to evaluate networks and track down issues?

[IamDavid]

As my home network has continued to grow, I've found it harder and harder to isolate issues that pop up. Wi-Fi dead spots, cable failures, cables that just suck, and so on. On any given day we'll have 75-125 devices on the network. I have a basic Cable Tester (Scout 3) but it's not very useful outside of telling me if the entire line is down.

Thanks for any suggestions.

 

[Tech Junky]

Dead spots - phone app wifi analyzer
Cables - loopback plug

Sounds like a mini smb network to me. Just have to deal with the gremlins as they appear. There's no one stop tool that works for every issue though. Setup some monitoring tools to spot things. For some stuff ntopng works for monitoring bandwidth and source/destination traffic. Mrtg will give you basic graphs to spot devices that stop working. If you're using APs there should be a dashboard showing devices. Ping the broadcast address to populate the ARP table to get a device count.

 

[JackMDS]

Free Portables that Helps dealing with Network etc.

Freeware Tools and System Utilities for Windows

Unique collection of freeware utilities and freeware password recovery tools

www.nirsoft.net

* If you have concerns about False positive read this.Read also this...

NirBlog » Blog Archive » Antivirus statistics and scores according to false positives of NirSoft tools

 

[mxnerd]

Spiceworks and its alternatives, along with (above mentioned) other tools

https://alternativeto.net/software/spiceworks/about/

https://alternativeto.net/software/spiceworks/