Pingnoo

Traceroute is one of the common commands network administrators use in their daily activity. With its help, they can follow a packet’s route to its destination and report the IP addresses of all the routers it pings. Moreover, it is the simplest means of assessing the network latency, meaning the time a packet takes to transit from source to destination.

While traceroute is usually run by network admins via the command console, there are dedicated applications that allow you to track down a packet and measure its transit delay from a more user-friendly GUI. That is the case with Pingnoo.

Released under an open-source license, Pingnoo is a network connection analysis tool whose purpose is to facilitate the analysis of a packet’s route in real time, allowing users to measure the latency in each of the nodes it reaches.

The application’s interface is pretty intuitive, but there are a few functions that are not yet implemented, as Pingnoo is in its early development stages.   The route analyzer displays a table where you can see all the hops a packet goes through, along with the number of packets that reached it, the corresponding IP address and the router’s name. Pingnoo displays the total delay from the first node to the last, along with the average, the minimum, the maximum and the current latency.

Right below, Pingnoo displays real time evolution graphs for each of the nodes. Each graph is automatically updated and contains the latency (in milliseconds) of a packet over time. Unfortunately, there are not options to zoom in the graph or save it to your computer for reference. In fact, no exporting option is implemented at the moment.

What is interesting about Pingnoo is that it can record the latency history for each of the nodes, displaying the values in a graph that is updated in real time. The visual representation surely helps administrators and others easily spot a problem and promptly respond, if necessary. However, its development is in progress and there is a long way to go before it becomes a full-featured application, ready to use by professionals.