Why network testing is very important

Posted by Thomas Shaw on November 25th, 2020

Network testing use cases



Network testing ought to be run ad-hoc following a configuration transform to validate that everything went well, also as permanently, through active network monitoring, to detect network problems as quickly as they take place. Within the very first case, here are some situations in which you desire to validate your design and implementation assumptions just after a configuration alter: Get a lot more data about strongest stresser
 


Circuits or site turn-up: once a new remote site or WAN hyperlink is installed, you'll be able to confirm having a tool like iPerf that you get the bandwidth requested of your carrier and with ping to confirm that the circuit has no packet loss.



Routing policy modify: on account of network complexity, the larger the network, the greater the threat that a routing policy change may have unexpected consequences in your routing table. By relying on distributed monitoring agents that run continuous ping and traceroute tests in a full-mesh fashion, it is possible to validate in real-time that a routing policy alter is modifying your routing table as anticipated.



Firewall rules updates: it’s generally superior practice to verify that a new firewall ruleset is successfully implemented, irrespective of whether it really should be blocking, or allowing, certain traffic. To confirm a prosperous update of a firewall, you could use a port scanner like nmap, or carry out a TCP-based ping test in the unprotected to the protected network.



Good quality of Service (QoS): applying a QoS configuration to your network is not a simple activity. There are actually countless dependencies and tiny things that could go wrong, so testing is really vital to confirm that, inside the end, the network is classifying, marking, and queuing your traffic as developed. If you want to understand more about this use case, you may study a blog post by Matt Smith about tips on how to validate QoS.



So how do we get started with network testing? One of your tools that could get you started with is already within your hands, and it’s called the terminal. No matter if you might be within a Unix/Linux, Windows, or Mac atmosphere, the out-of-the-box command line interface (CLI) provides a great deal of utilities that could be used to perform network validation, including ping and traceroute.



The only challenge using the CLI is that it’s local and not distributed. It is possible to telnet or SSH to various remote hosts, and remotely carry out the same tests which you would locally run. Even so, this method does not scale and it does not supply historical data. For this reason, it is important to work with a distributed, GUI-driven testing solution that simultaneously runs network testing commands on quite a few hosts and stores their final results for historical review. NetBeez is usually a network monitoring solution that delivers these features in a browser-based interface. You may run ad-hoc, or permanently, commands like ping, traceroute, and iPerf.