Ethr 1.0 – A comprehensive network measurement and analysis tool

We run some of the most performance critical services in the cloud. These services offer 100s of Gbps bandwidth running via our software components. In the past, I have also built core networking virtualization that runs on every Azure machine. For building these network intensive services and components, it is critical to have tools for network measurements that can help optimize performance, isolate issues and prevent regressions. We use variety of tools to do various types of measurements and tune our software components.

In this post, I talk about an open source tool called Ethr, built as a side project, to provide many such capabilities in a single, easy to use binary. The tool is recently released as v1.0 and supports various types of network measurements such as throughput, packets/s, connections/s, network latency, ICMP & TCP ping, traceroute and MyTraceRoute. This makes it convenient to do various types of measurements without having to download and maintain a multitude of tools.

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