We've developed this page to further assist you in finding the right Nessoft product for your troubleshooting and/or network monitoring needs. We'll start out with a relatively high level description of each product, and then discuss some typical and real-life examples of how we envison the products being used. Please send us a note to info@nessoft.com if you have any questions that aren't addressed and we will do our best to answer them.

MultiPing

MultiPing is designed around the premise of monitoring (via ping) a number of hosts. Let's go over some typical scenarios where MultiPing can be a great asset to you.

First of all, let's use the example of someone like an online gamer or stock trader. In both instances, you may have numerous hosts that you may be able to connect to, however what you want to know is which host is going to be able to give you the best connection. What you can do in this case is have a MultiPing session running in the background monitoring all the possible hosts. At a glance, via the graphical view MultiPing gives you, you can see which host has the better ping time, i.e. the better connection. Of course there's all kinds of other issues involved outside of the network connection that can affect performance, i.e. server load, etc. However, with MultiPing you can at least narrow your choices down to the host that is providing you it's best on the network side of things. If you stretch this scenario a bit, you can even envision this stock trader also being an online gamer. With MultiPing's "workspaces" feature, you can have one workspace that contains all the sites for your stock trading during the day, and then you can load up another workspace when you've made your trading fortune for the day and you're ready to let off some steam with your favorite online game. Of course you don't have to be an online gamer or stock trader to appreciate the type of scenario just described. There are many other types of situations where you'd want to monitor multiple hosts and have the need to intuitively come up with which host has the best connection.

Secondly, we see another primary user of MultiPing being someone who wants to monitor numerous endpoints to either watch uptime, or have the ability to watch endpoints over a length of time for performance. We had one early beta tester of MultiPing describe to us how he's using MultiPing to monitor the websites he's selling space to on servers he owns. He typically has 15-20 sites on each of these servers, and he's using MultiPing to watch those sites for uptime and also utilizing MultiPing's alert functionality to email an alert to him on his cellphone whenever one of those sites stops responding. The beauty of this is that within one application he is able to watch those, say, 20 sites. With MultiPing's timeline graphs he also has the ability to scroll back in time and watch the response times of those sites so he can see if there were issues during a particular time during the day, or on previous days he had that instance of MultiPing watch those sites.

PingPlotter

PingPlotter's emphasis is on long-term monitoring of the entire route to a particular host, with the ability to troubleshoot and diagnose problems along that entire route. Whereas MultiPing gives you the ability to monitor multiple endpoints, a lot of times the endpoint isn't your problem, but instead lies somewhere in between you and the host. Where PingPlotter really shines is the ability to watch the entire route and show you that, for instance, there's an overloaded router halfway between you and the host that's causing the poor performance. The best part is that it does it graphically. PingPlotter shows you what's going on (via a combination of traceroute, ping and whois) underneath the connection you may be monitoring in MultiPing, and allows you to see the whole picture. PingPlotter keeps track of the route changes for you, allows you to save the route information (data or a graph image) at intervals that you specify (so you can go back days, weeks or years later and see where there were problems), set alerts on any hop(s) to notify you of problems and you can even see the timeline graphs for multiple hops.

As an example, we know of one customer that was having intermittent problems with a VPN connection between Idaho in the United States and Australia. What this customer did is setup PingPlotter to trace between his location and the host in Australia. At first he really couldn't see any problems. However, it wasn't very long before his users were calling again saying that performance was slow to the web application they were using in Australia. He was way ahead of them, however, because he'd used PingPlotter's alert capability to setup an email alert when the last hop (in this case the gateway for the LAN that had the webserver) had poor performance. What he saw was that two hops away from the gateway the ISP in Australia had a 10GB router that was showing significant packet loss whenever his users were experiencing problems. He was then able to save off graph images over the next two days that showed that poor performance, send those images to the ISP and get the router fixed. He now has PingPlotter setup to save graph images every 30 minutes so that his users can go look at the images themselves and see if there were problems with the connection that correspond to a time period of sluggish performance.

Of course this is just one example of how one particular user was able to use the information gleaned from PingPlotter to diagnose, troubleshoot and get a problem fixed. The open ended flexiblity, numerous features and "tools within the tool" that PingPlotter gives you are substantial and we believe unequaled at PingPlotter's price point.

In Summary

So as you can see, both tools have both overlapping and unique features that between them allow you enormous flexibility to cover a significant number of scenarios. If you have numerous endpoints that you want to monitor, then MultiPing is most likely the product for you. If you need to diagnose and troubleshoot a problem with one of those endpoints, or need the ability to see how you're getting to a particular endpoint and want the ability to save that data then PingPlotter is most likely the best fit. If you want to monitor numerous sites, have an alert generated when there's a problem, and then need the ability to diagnose and troubleshoot that problem then both products in tandem could be the best fit for you. The beauty of it is that you have the flexibility with Nessoft's tools to craft your own solution that suits your particular need with easy to use, intuitive graphical tools.