Network Engineer Tools
Learn how to leverage network engineer tools for IT success
What are network engineer tools?
Network engineer tools are designed to support a vast array of responsibilities related to network monitoring and management. Network engineers and other IT professionals tasked with managing complex computer networks must have appropriate network engineer software tools available to measure current performance levels, make plans for network optimization, and implement their strategies effectively.
Job duties for a network engineer can include:
- Designing network configurations
- Ensuring the network infrastructure delivers high-quality services to end users
- Monitoring network performance at a higher level
- Troubleshooting performance issues
- Setting up security systems and protocols
To juggle these responsibilities and more, IT professionals need a network engineer kit, which is a set of tools designed to support network engineering. Meeting each of the above responsibilities requires performing a range of tasks—and those tasks are much easier with the right automated tool. For instance, calculating subnets or generating secure passwords takes too much time when performed manually, but the right toolset can help streamline these types of tasks, for faster and more accurate results.
What types of tools do network engineers need?
Network engineers need tools to help them tackle a range of responsibilities, to ensure they can achieve comprehensive network infrastructure management and optimization. A network engineer should have at least one high-quality piece of network engineer software in each of the following categories:
- Network configuration management: These network technician tools can help engineers automatically monitor and track all hardware and software changes in a network.
- Network diagnostics: These tools can help engineers quickly find key health status data for network connectivity and specific devices on a network, including workstations, firewalls, and routers. With this information, engineers can troubleshoot more quickly and accurately.
- All-purpose systems management: These tools can provide the charts, graphs, maps, and other overviews for network engineers to manage their systems effectively.
- IPAM/DNS/DHCP: These tools support functionalities related to IP addresses, including subnetting.
- SNMP: These tools provide SNMP-based capabilities and insights for better device management.
- Log management: These tools help network engineers gather and analyze data logs to generate insights about network performance.
- Network discovery: These tools help engineers more easily discover assets on a network.
- Network monitoring: These tools are designed to help engineers monitor device health, bandwidth, and potential bottlenecks in real time.
- Security: These tools can help engineers secure the network from various types of cybersecurity threats.
- Network administration: Tools to manage and monitor CPU, memory utilization, response time, and more.
Why is using tools designed for network engineers important?
It’s important to use a set of tools designed specifically for—and by—network engineers if you hope to troubleshoot and resolve network issues effectively. Network engineering kits are different from other combinations of network management tools out there because they’re compiled to address the common issues network engineers face and the solutions they need.
A network engineer could very well bypass a network engineer kit and piece together a range of separate tools with different interfaces. However, this would ultimately slow down their workflow and make it difficult to integrate insights into an overall troubleshooting process.
Admins might also be tempted to rely on free, online tools for specific aspects of network management. However, these tools cannot guarantee a high level of quality and accuracy. They aren’t tools for network technicians—they’re often geared toward casual users rather than professionals and offer limited insight and support.
On the other hand, with the right set of tools for network engineers, it’s possible to leverage a range of capabilities to automate a range of technical tasks and achieve faster insights. For instance, a toolset can provide network engineers with support for processes related to ping, SNMP, DNS, MIB, NetFlow, and other common protocols and methodologies. Taking a manual approach to these types of tasks would slow anyone down—but with the right network engineer kit, IT professionals can easily leverage a wide range of tactics for resolving the issue at hand.
Network engineer toolkit requirements
A network engineer toolkit must feature a wide range of high-quality tools to help network engineers fulfill their range of responsibilities. This ensures network engineers have access to everything they need for network infrastructure management—from diagnostics to security.
However, the number of tools for network technicians in a kit isn’t the only thing that matters. A network engineer toolkit must also have a way for you to easily access all those tools and view all your features at a glance. It’s also helpful if you can segment your tools into groups of your choosing and view network statistics in tabbed views.
Similarly, an enterprise-grade network engineer toolkit should offer intuitive, web-based interfaces with visibility into key metrics. For example, a network engineer tool equipped with a CPU monitor can allow you to simultaneously monitor load for multiple devices in real time. From the same dashboard, you can also set, monitor, and respond to alarms when certain devices reach critical thresholds.
When these requirements are combined in a network engineer toolkit, network infrastructure management can become easier.
What is SolarWinds Engineer’s Toolset (ETS)?
SolarWinds® Engineer’s Toolset™ (ETS) is built to take the guesswork out of finding and using the best network management tools on the market. This network engineer software comes equipped with over 60 must-have tools for network management, monitoring, and optimization.
Network engineers can launch any one of these tools from the platform’s user-friendly, customizable web console. The product offers high-quality, enterprise-grade tools in nine primary areas of interest to engineers: configuration management, diagnostics, SNMP, IPAM, security, systems management, network discovery, network monitoring, and log management.
These tools are designed to make it easier to answer typical questions for network engineers, including: how can I better manage IP addresses? Where do I find information on how network devices use resources? How can I monitor bandwidth usage for all my devices and troubleshoot bottlenecks in real-time?
Since ETS can also be integrated with SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor (NPM), network engineers can access intuitive web interface tools on any element within NPM. This can help facilitate faster troubleshooting and more comprehensive network management.
What tools are included in ETS?
Some of the most popular tools in ETS include:
- Subnet Calculator: Calculate subnets for any IP address with available advanced features to calculate subnet masks, break down IP addresses, and leverage calculation-based reports on subnet addresses.
- Open Port Scanner: Check for open ports across your network.
- Response Time Monitor: View how many devices are available in tabular form.
- SNMP MIB Browser: Automatically search through an extensive list of proprietary MIBs.
- Password Generator: Automatically generate secure, random passwords for all users on a network.
- Ping Sweep: Simultaneously send multiple packets and scan your IP range by performing a fast ICMP sweep.
- Wake-On-LAN: Turn on any PC remotely.
- Traffic Generator WAN Killer: Test the strength of your network by generating random traffic and adjusting circuit bandwidth or load.
- Bandwidth Gauges: Monitor how much data is sent and received from any device and check whether certain devices are using network bandwidth effectively.
- CPU Monitor: Monitor and graph the CPU load for multiple devices in real time, providing CPU and host statistics in a tabular form.
- MAC Address Scanner: Automatically search your list of switches for a MAC address.
- Switch Port Mapper: Find out which devices are connected to which ports and find out specific details about the port.
- DNS and WhoIs Resolver: Find out information about domain names, IP addresses, and host names.
- Spam Blacklist Check: Easily block incoming spam messages by running the IP addresses found on your email server against known blacklisted servers.
- Memory Monitor: Monitor memory utilization across your network’s devices in real time.
Additionally, SolarWinds ETS features tools like Config Compare, Config Downloader, Config Uploader, and Config Viewer to help you better manage configurations by allowing you to more easily uncover differences, download Cisco configurations, regulate user access, and back up configurations by date. Another tool included in ETS, TFTP Server, can support your ability to upload and download configurations to routers and switches at the same time.
For managing networks, SolarWinds ETS also includes several tools to support your ability to more easily organize DNS resource records (DNS Analyzer) and find DNS errors using reverse DNS lookups (DNS Audit). To better protect networks against cyberattacks, ETS also has a number of tools to aid you in taking proactive security measures to identify potential vulnerabilities, such as its SNMP Brute Force Attack tool, designed to try every possible community string to find out the SNMP read-only and read and write strings, and its SNMP Dictionary Attack tool designed to bombard IP addresses with queries to find SNMP community strings using dictionary term.
What makes SolarWinds ETS different?
SolarWinds Engineer’s Toolset is designed to stand out from other network engineering tools on the market because it’s a Geekbuilt® solution designed for network engineers, by network and systems engineers who know what it takes to manage today’s dynamic IT environments.
Having a collection of network management tools doesn’t necessarily mean you have a complete network engineer’s toolkit. Network engineers need a set of tools carefully curated to their specific needs. SolarWinds has a deep connection to the IT community and a commitment to giving the IT community the tools they need to succeed.
With SolarWinds ETS, network engineers can easily:
- Monitor response time, memory, CPU, and interface statistics
- Use Traceroute to track network path routes and latency
- Alert on issues in real time
- Automate processes related to discovery and diagnostics
- Manage Cisco devices
- Integrate with the SolarWinds Orion® Platform for additional context and control
- And much more
Optimize monitoring and management with network engineer tools
Engineer's Toolset
- Automatically discover network devices as well as map network topology.
- Track device availability, memory utilization, CPU load, interface statistics, and performance & latency of network paths.
- Quickly troubleshoot your network with enhanced ping capabilities and packet route tracing.
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