Summary

This review was originally posted on VersionTracker.com.
Network filtering through firewalls, ACLs and other security mechanisms such as IDS/IPS make troubleshooting a more difficult task with the "typical" tool sets. Traceroute and ping are a thing of the past as far as their usefulness. Tools today must mimick the actual service traffic they are attempting to identify and/or troubleshoot. PA Pro is great at this! An easy to use GUI allows even the novice to use and understand (with features like synopsis and chart graphs) but more importantly PA Pro has the featureset and flexibility to be an excellent tool for even the most advanced security engineer. I don't believe any tool should be considered "all-in-one" but PA Pro does a great job of eliminating many tools from the network/security admins tool kit. I have used it on Mac and Windows (through Parallels on MacBook Pro) and had no issues with installations or use. Its a bummer about TCP in Windows but maybe Microsoft will hear enough complaints over their XP SP2 doings and fix this in Vista. ;-)

I would recommend this tool to anyone in the sysadmin, network admin or security arena! Its functionality and ease of use cannot be found for this price in many (if any) other products.

Summary

This review was originally posted on VersionTracker.com.
This application is a life-saver for people dealing with network providers or who develop web applications for customers. Performance is always an issue and the ability to trace specific ports and get real performance characteristics avoids improper finger-pointing. Path Analyzer Pro is perfect for that stuff and with nice-looking reports and the ability to export graphs and send them to people, it's easy to get the point across. Super helpful, especially for the low cost. This app is a bargain at twice the price. This is not just a traceroute tool with a pretty map. It actually does stuff.

Pros

Having used visualroute, neotrace, and others, I've found this to be the best network utility in this space. Great UI on both Windows and Mac OS X (though better on Mac OS X), great reports and export capabilities, great advanced options for tracing.

Cons

The geo/map feature gives you multiple sources to find the geo information, but no one's geo information is really reliable, not even the governments'. This is unimportant as it is only one of many features and really not a useful one as far as network administration goes, just cool looking.

Pros

Pretty user interface on both Windows and Mac OS X.

Cool report generation features for management types including good-looking maps and charts.

Firewall detection and identification make it easy to track down what's in the way of a network entity.

Easily find what's in the way that could be causing problems--good for tracking down what ISP is responsible for a problem.

Support for numerous info lookup sources so you're not stuck with one.

Cons

The name is deceptive because it does a lot more than analyze network paths. It's more of a whois/ping/traceroute/network graphing utility.

The documentation could be improved. The tool has many advanced settings that could be better explained.

Summary

This review was originally posted on VersionTracker.com.
Path Analyzer Pro can be a career-saver. Well, maybe it's not not powerful, but it actually helps solve tough-to-diagnose or intermittant problems. When we had a network issue and were arguing with our service provider about where the problem was, Path Analyzer Pro helped us determine where in the line things were messing up. Providers often tell customers to use traceroute to help diagnose problems, but traceroute only uses UDP or ICMP, which are handled differently by routers and applications. Path Analyzer lets you select what protocol to use (TCP is perfect for testing web application network performance in our case). In any case, traceroute an conceal problems and performance issues, clearing the ISP of responsibility, where this program will give you the evidence you need to hammer them on the real issues.

Using this program, we can export charts as images and e-mail them to the provider (it made it easy for even a non-network-person to see where the problems were and how bad they were). We can also export the statistics generated by the timed measurements feature as a spreadsheet file.

This program has my vote for a must-have network utility.

Summary

This review was originally posted on VersionTracker.com.
In contrast to the command line program Layer Four Traceroute (LFT), this application looks good but performs with significantly less usable output. In fact, it fails to trace more often than not.

The principle focus of Layer Four Traceroute is to poke through the annoying blocks of ICMP trace route mechanisms to identify network problems (and otherwise hold those accountable who escape accountability via blocking ICMP). More often than not, this utility fails to perform, provides no output beyond "blocked" where as LFT just works. I am *not* a fan of command line interfaces (been there, done that, went to detox) and am really enthusiastic about the potential of this application. Until this app reaches its stride, I will continue to use the IPNetMonitorX and its implementation of TCPTraceRoute and, on occasion, the CLI LFT. Looking forward to the fixes and will buy this when it works.