Free tools to see what is on your network, whether it is up, and where latency or packet loss begins.
NetXMS is a full monitoring platform with automatic topology maps, The Dude draws a quick live map (MikroTik has discontinued it), PingPlotter Free shows where along a route a connection degrades, and LANMonitor gives a fast view of the local network without installing anything.
Guides: Free network monitoring tools for Windows · Free bandwidth monitoring and traffic control · NetXMS vs Zabbix
NetXMS isn’t “modern” in the way people mean it now. But it’s stable, deep, and can bend to odd setups without much drama. If you’ve got networks that don’t fit into a tidy model — this might be one of the few tools that won’t complain.
PingPlotter Free won’t replace your monitoring stack, but it will solve problems. It turns vague hunches into hard proof. It catches the drop that happened five minutes ago — and shows where it happened in the route.
LANMonitor isn’t new. It doesn’t pretend to be modern. But when you need eyes on a LAN — right now, from a Windows laptop, without deploying anything — it quietly gets the job done
The Dude draws a live map of your network and alerts you when devices stop answering. It is free, but MikroTik has officially discontinued it — the server runs as a RouterOS package and still works, with no further development. Fine for a quick map of a small network; for a new long-term project, choose a maintained tool.
