TracePlus Ethernet 5.51.000

TracePlus/Ethernet is a powerful network monitoring and capture tool but its huge features will affect a user not so experienced with networking. This application comes as a suite of tools for computer literates or specialized IT personnel.

Well, TracePlus is a professional network tool, supporting 10-1000 MIPS Ethernet networks. The network dashboard displays network performance that updates every second. It provides almost any statistics of your network. The most important are: bandwith by IP, top URLs, port activity, and traffic flow. IP Sleuth is a feature that can track addresses and provides contact information (traceroute and whois). If the network that you want to analyze is too big, you can do different packet captures.

The actual version supports IPv6, ICMPv6, and VLAN features of the 802.1Q/802.1P protocols. The interface can be configured by the user. The bad thing is that the huge number of features makes the interface to be quite difficult to use. The only thing that will ease you work is the graphical part of the interface represented by the Dashboard that will show you almost live the Ethernet traffic.

Pluses: the dashboard; the ability of doing packet captures; supports IPv6; the results are updating at every second.

Drawbacks / flaws: There is no trace switchroute included. This would be useful when talking about large networks.

In conclusion: This program is definitely recommended only for professionals.

version reviewed: 5.51.000