A Network Round-Trip

There are significant pieces of network machinery -- appliances that provide ever greater amounts of analysis and realtime reporting on all manner of issues picked up through the examination and dissection of traffic into and out of a network. Depending on the size of the network and the horsepower of the appliance, solutions can range into the deep-five figures and occupy a pizza-box-size space in a rack.

Other software-only solutions have begun to proliferate, with the IT space getting behind solutions, including the open source Wireshark. This is an application that the CRN Test Center has examined and has liked enough to recommend as a great turnkey solution with minimal amounts of training necessary to begin effectively monitoring network traffic.

Other open source solutions are still works-in-progress, such as the Linux-integrated AutoFocus application that, like Wireshark, provides realtime and graphical analysis of what's happening in a network.

If you're developing Web-based applications -- including, say, cloud-based applications -- a key factor in their success will be performance. Latency in many kinds of applications can be more than frustrating; it can cost time and money depending on the function.

Microsoft provides two tools that can be deployed to keep tabs on Web performance of an application and monitor overall network traffic.

Microsoft Network Monitor 3.3 allows one to view the contents of network packets that are sent and received over a live network connection, and can allow someone monitoring a network to filter based on a specific application; it will provide realtime data on application performance and behavior. We installed Network Monitor 3.3 on a Windows 7 machine and were up and analyzing application performance and traffic in a matter of minutes. It's a straightforward, yet effective, tool for keeping track of specific applications.

Microsoft Visual Roundtrip Analyzer is a tool that lets developers "visualize" a page's download—looking at communications protocol. It helps a developer pinpoint areas where an application makes "excessive round-trips" across a network, thereby slowing it down and impacting performance. Again, this was a simple application to download, install and get up and running.

We paid nothing to download and install these tools, and the time it took to install and begin working with them could be well worth the investment in productivity for developers, VARs, an enterprise and end users. We think that basic network traffic analysis will play a critical role in the buildout and acceptance of cloud-based tools. When it comes to cloud services, latency threatens to become real buzzkill.

Installing and using network-appropriate tools to monitor latency issues will be an increasingly important "best practice" moving forward, and here, Microsoft is providing tools that work.

Whether you're more comfortable with open source, like Wireshark; proprietary solutions, like Microsoft's Network Monitor 3.3 and Visual Roundtrip Analyzer; or whether you prefer a software-only approach or an appliance-based approach for performance or other reasons, constant analysis of network traffic and performance isn't really an option. Thankfully, good solutions continue to proliferate.

The bottom line: Microsoft has a vested interest in helping developers keep their applications and networks optimized, as IT choices are becoming more competitive and more ubiquitous.

These tools are fine; they work, they're accessible and Microsoft has been working to improve them quickly. It may be too much to ask Microsoft to provide cross-platform tools the way Wireshark and others do, but these can do the trick quickly for those in Microsoft environments.

COMMUNITY: Connect with the CRN Test Center at community.crn.com.