Network utility

A network utility is utility software for analyzing and configuring networking. Many such utilities were originally developed for Unix and later ported to other operating systems.

Examples

Tools found on most operating systems include:
; ifconfig: For network interface configuration. Available on Unix-like systems. In many Linux distributions, deprecated in favor of iproute2.
; ipconfig: Similar to ifconfig. Available on Windows systems.
; iproute2: Collection of utilities for network configuration. Available on Linux systems.
; ping: Checks connectivity with a host. Reports packet loss and latency. Uses ICMP. Broadly available for many systems.
; route: Displays an IP routing table.
; netsh: Allows local or remote configuration of network devices. Available on Windows.
; netstat: Displays network connections, routing tables, and a number of network interface and network protocol statistics. It is used for finding problems in the network and to determine the amount of traffic on the network as a performance measurement.
; nslookup: Queries a Domain Name System server for DNS data. Deprecated on Unix systems in favor of host and dig., the preferred tool for Windows.
; spray: Sends numerous packets to a host and reports results.
; traceroute: Shows the series of successive systems a packet goes through en route to its destination on a network. It works by sending packets with sequential TTLs which generate ICMP TTL-exceeded messages from the hosts the packet passes through. Broadly available for many systems.
; vnStat: Monitors network traffic from the console. It allows to keep the traffic information in a log system to be analyzed by third party tools.