In the last post in this series, I introduced the Network Monitor Experts, which basically is a set of plug-ins for Microsoft Network Monitor 3.3. Top Users Expert is an extension that helps you find heavy talkers in a captured trace. "Users" should not be understood literally here. In this context, users essentially are just IP addresses. Top User Experts enables you to analyze how much bandwidth machines connected to your computer are using. This can be useful if your network is clogged and you want to find the culprit. Of course, there are many other scenarios, such as when you have to know how much bandwidth a certain service requires.
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Like the other extensions, Top User Expert analyzes a Network Monitor capture file. That is, you can't apply the tool to a Capture tab. To use Top User Expert, you have to open a capture file first, and then launch the program from the Experts menu.
There are two different Experts, which have to be installed separately: Top Users by Endpoints and Top Users by Conversations. Endpoints are basically remote IP addresses. Thus, Top User by Endpoints analyzes the traffic between your computer and all remote IP addresses in the trace. Top Users by Conversations essentially does the same. As far I can tell from my tests, the only difference between the two is that Top Users by Conversations distinguishes between different local IP addresses. Hence, if your computer has more than one IP, Top Users by Conversations will show the traffic for each IP separately, whereas Top Users by Endpoints doesn't care from which local IP the traffic originated.
Top User Expert displays a table where each row represents an address with statistics about the connection. These are the different columns: Total Bytes, Total Frames, Bytes Sent, Frames Sent, KB/s Sent, Bytes Received, Frames Received, KB/s Received. You can sort the rows by clicking on a column. This way, you will easily find the network bandwidth squanderers.
If your computer has more than one network interface, then you can use the tool to display how much bandwidth each of the network interfaces has consumed. For this, you have to enable the address type "hardware". In "Tree View", Top User Experts will group connections with regard to the corresponding NIC. And just in case you are already working with IPv6, Top Users Experts allows you to focus on either the IPv4 or IPv6 traffic.
It is also possible to generate a bar chart and a pie chart. However, this only works if you have Microsoft Chart Control for .NET 3.5 Sp1 installed. If address type hardware is enabled, Top User Experts will create two pie charts on top of each other, one for the hardware addresses and one for the IP addresses.
This review is about Top User Expert v2.0. In the next post of this series, I will discuss TCP Analyzer, a Network Monitor extension that allows you to gather statistical data about TCP connections.
It may not be a packateer but very handy and free 🙂
Thank you.
Yes, it is a very simple tool. It just gives you an idea how your bandwidth is used.