There are basically two parts to measuring performance over the network.

1. Capture the data ( or view it in real time )
2. Process the data in a way that gives you some meaningful results

I will go into more detail on data capture in later posts, but for now I am concentrating on simply and effective ways to analyze any data be it previously captured or real time.

In short one of the most effective piece of software to work with network traffic is Wireshark.

Wireshark can be downloaded for free here Wireshark.org

It´s a great tool that can capture data in real time and also analyse captures in great detail

Wireshark has a great deal of features, some that might even suprise experienced wireshark users including flexible command line utilities such a tshark and more.

A lot of my articles on this site will involve Wireshark in some way, as it´s an essential tool in any network engineer’s toolkit.

So if you have not used it, go to wireshark and give it a try.