Our office is connected via T1 line to corporate office. Lately, we've been noticing degradation in network performance between offices. We suspected that the network traffic is interrupted between our router and corporate router. I want to setup PingPlotter to monitor the traffic for certain period of times to pin point the source of the problem. I currently setup PingPlotter with the default setup #TimestoTrace:Unlimited, TraceInterval:15Sec, Samplestoinclude:10, TimePeriod:48hours.

Will this setup able to help me locate the source of the problem?

Thanks for your help in advance.
Coolnyan

PingPlotter doesn't actually monitor traffic. It monitors latency and packet loss, and then lets you display that over time, for each hop that participated in the route. If you have multiple routers participating in getting data between your offices, then PingPlotter can help pinpoint which router is the most likely culprit. In addition, it can graph over time so you can look for certain patterns of latency and/or packet loss (or lack thereof).

PingPlotter can certainly help in your situation, and has been used by many, many people and companies to do just that. With a T1, you'll probably want to do something more like 2.5 second intervals. You'll then want to look for particular periods of packet loss and/or latency and adjust the time scale and samples to include numbers to best examine the data. These settings do not affect the collected data, just the way its displayed.

Ideally, you'd be able to correlate periods of slow percieved performance with some latency or packet loss problems collected in PingPlotter. When you've got that, look for the first hop that is showing packet loss or latency and then start applying some logic and phone calls / emails to that problem to determine what's going on.