Article Options

Managing your IP address inventory with Ping Your Network—NMC Tool #1

HPSW-Guest| February 6, 2013 - last edited February 13, 2013
Post a Comment
0

By Mark Pinskey

Sr. Product Marketing Manager – Automated Network Management

 

Editor's note: HP Software announced last week the launch of six free network utilities. This series of blog posts provides short overviews of how each tool can help you manage your network.

Ping Your Network is an essential tool for managing your IP address inventory, tracking changes and determining whether IP addresses and hostnames are in use and reachable. This is important for identifying what IP addresses are available and assessing the health of specific nodes.

What it does
Ping Your Network does just what it says it does: it pings each host in a given network and retrieves reachability and hostnames for network devices on any subnet. There is no need to build your own scripts, and this tool provides its own UI. It also attempts to provide round-trip time (RTT) for each ping, which can indicate issues with networks or servers.

Simply enter a network address (e.g. 192.168.1.0 or 192.168.1.100) and a valid subnetmask and press “Ping The Network”. The tool calculates all the IP addresses within that range and pings each of them, printing the IP address, reachability, hostname and RTT in a text-base table (Figure 1).

 

Pingscreenshot.png

Fig. 1

Click the “Stop” button to end the ping operation before the entire network is covered.

Once the ping action is complete for a given set of network addresses and mask, you can export the results to a CSV file, so you can sort, filter, count or other function in software such as Microsoft Excel.

How it works
HP Ping Your Network pings each of the IP addresses with a default interval of 0.5 seconds and provides reachability (yes/no) as the output.

For each of the hosts calculated, it attempts a hostname lookup based on default name server configured on the system where it is running. the tool provides hostname.domainname.com as the output based on the response from nameserver. If there is no lookup for the particular host, the output is ‘NA’. If lookup takes longer than the default timeout of 1.5 seconds, the IP address is printed in place of the hostname. (You can configure the timeout in the PinYNT.conf file, located in <Install directory>\bin, which provides two entries for configuring timeout settings for ping interval and hostname lookup.)

RTT is also noted for each host and provided as an output. RTT is shown in milliseconds with an accuracy of %3.5f (3 digits before decimal and 5 digits after decimal).

In addition to the four outputs, the tool logs the four outputs (ip address, reachability, hostname and RTT) at: %temp%\HP_PingYourNw.log

Download the tool
Check out HP Ping Your Network and all the free utilities and administration tools that are part of the Network Management Center suite.

Next in the series, we look at HP User Registrations Viewer for Microsoft Lync, which helps you quickly view the inventory for configured and registered Lync users, visualize user registration across servers and pools, check compliance for application versions on client side.

Tags: HP NMC| network management| Network Management Center| network toolkit| NMC| View All (6)
Labels: HP Ping Your Network| Network Management Center| NMC Toolkit
Labels:
0
Leave a Comment

We encourage you to share your comments on this post. Comments are moderated and will be reviewed
and posted as promptly as possible during regular business hours

To ensure your comment is published, be sure to follow the Community Guidelines.
Be sure to enter a unique name. You can't reuse a name that's already in use.
Be sure to enter a unique email address. You can't reuse an email address that's already in use.
Type the characters you see in the picture above.Type the words you hear.
 
Search
turn on suggestions Auto-suggest helps you quickly narrow down your search results by suggesting possible matches as you type.
Auto-suggest helps you quickly narrow down your search results by suggesting possible matches as you type.
About the Author(s)
  • Beth Parker is a Product Marketing Manager for HP Software. Beth is responsible for outbound marketing and sales enablement for the HP Systems Management portfolio including HP Operations Manager, Operations Agents, Smart Plug-ins and SiteScope. She is based in Naples, Florida.
  • Doug is a subject matter expert for network and system performance management. With an engineering career spanning 25 years at HP, Doug has worked in R&D, support, and technical marketing positions, and is an ambassador for quality and the customer interest.
  • This account is for guest bloggers. The blog post will identify the blogger.
  • Jim is a technology marketer with over two decades experience in product launch, branding, and product marketing
  • Jimmy Augustine is Director of Product Marketing within HP Software and leads the HP Application Performance Management and Configuration Management System product marketing teams. JImmy has been with HP for over a year. Prior to HP, Jimmy was VP of Marketing for ASG Software Solutions. Prior to joining ASG, Jimmy was at IBM for ten years. He was a marketing manager for IBM's Outsourcing business, the market leader, and helped launch IBM's market leading web hosting business. Jimmy holds an M.S. in industrial engineering and a B.S. in aerospace engineering from the University of Florida. Jimmy resides in Naples, FL with his wife and two children.
  • Ken is responsible for worldwide marketing of HP’s virtualization and systems management products. His experience includes over 20 years in marketing, product management and business development. In addition to IT management software, his background includes enterprise storage and systems.
  • Mark Pinskey is the Product Marketing Manager for HP Network Management Solutions within HP Software and concentrates on HP's Network Management Center software solutions. Mark has been with HP for over 29 years. Prior to HP, Mark has worked within the IT organization for the FBI in Washington D.C.. Mark has spent much time evangelizing HP's Automated Network Management solution and the value proposition this solution provides to customers. Mark holds a dual major B.S. in Political Science and Biology and additional credentialis in Computer Science. Mark resides in the Cleveland, Ohio area with his wife and two grown children.
  • Ramkumar Devanathan works in the IOM-Customer Assist Team (CAT) providing technical assistance to HP Software pre-sales and support teams with Operations Management products including vPV, SHO, VISPI. He has experience of more than 12 years in this product line, working in various roles ranging from developer to product architect.
  • Sonja is a Product Marketing Manager for the HP Software Operations Center portfolio of products. She has 19 years of product marketing, product management, engineering, and consulting experience with privately-held, start-up, and Fortune 500 companies. Sonja has been responsible for positioning, messaging, strategy, and go-to-market programs for both consumer and B2B product lines.  Companies that she has worked for include InstallShield, Loudcloud, Sun Microsystems, and AT&T.


Follow Us