NEW! Download Network Watcher
Ann Iacobucci
Azure Network Watcher provides a suite of tools to monitor, diagnose, view metrics, and enable or disable logs for Azure IaaS (Infrastructure-as-a-Service) resources. Network Watcher enables you to monitor and repair the network health of IaaS products like virtual machines (VMs), virtual networks (VNets), application gateways, load balancers, etc. Network Watcher isn't designed or intended for PaaS monitoring or Web analytics.
When you create or update a virtual network in your subscription, Network Watcher is automatically enabled in your virtual network's region. There's no impact on your resources or associated charge for automatically enabling Network Watcher. For more information, see Enable or disable Network Watcher.
Topology provides a visualization of the entire network for understanding network configuration. It provides an interactive interface to view resources and their relationships in Azure spanning across multiple subscriptions, resource groups, and locations. For more information, see Topology overview.
Connection monitor provides end-to-end connection monitoring for Azure and hybrid endpoints. It helps you understand network performance between various endpoints in your network infrastructure. For more information, see Connection monitor overview and Monitor network communication between two virtual machines.
IP flow verify allows you to detect traffic filtering issues at a virtual machine level. It checks if a packet is allowed or denied to or from an IP address (IPv4 or IPv6 address). It also tells you which security rule allowed or denied the traffic. For more information, see IP flow verify overview and Diagnose a virtual machine network traffic filter problem.
NSG diagnostics allows you to detect traffic filtering issues at a virtual machine, virtual machine scale set, or application gateway level. It checks if a packet is allowed or denied to or from an IP address, IP prefix, or a service tag. It tells you which security rule allowed or denied the traffic. It also allows you to add a new security rule with a higher priority to allow or deny the traffic. For more information, see NSG diagnostics overview and Diagnose network security rules.
Next hop allows you to detect routing issues. It checks if traffic is routed correctly to the intended destination. It provides you with information about the Next hop type, IP address, and Route table ID for a specific destination IP address. For more information, see Next hop overview and Diagnose a virtual machine network routing problem.
Effective security rules allows you to view the effective security rules applied to a network interface. It shows you all security rules applied to the network interface, the subnet the network interface is in, and the aggregate of both. For more information, see Effective security rules overview and View details of a security rule.
VPN troubleshoot enables you to troubleshoot virtual network gateways and their connections. For more information, see VPN troubleshoot overview and Diagnose a communication problem between networks.
Flow logs allows you to log information about your Azure IP traffic and stores the data in Azure storage. You can log IP traffic flowing through a network security group or Azure virtual network. For more information, see:
The Usage + quotas capability of Network Watcher provides a summary of how many of each network resource you've deployed in a subscription and region and what the limit is for the resource. For more information, see Networking limits to the number of network resources that you can create within an Azure subscription and region. This information is helpful when planning future resource deployments as you can't create more resources if you reach their limits within the subscription or region.
Monitor and diagnose networking issues without logging in to your virtual machines (VMs) using Network Watcher. Trigger packet capture by setting alerts, and gain access to real-time performance information at the packet level. When you see an issue, you can investigate in detail for better diagnoses.
Build a deeper understanding of your network traffic pattern using Network Security Group flow logs. Information provided by flow logs helps you gather data for compliance, auditing and monitoring your network security profile.
With Azure Network Watcher, you can now access a plethora of logging and diagnostic capabilities that empower you with insights to understand your network performance and health. These capabilities are accessible via Portal, Power Shell, CLI, Rest API and SDK.
You can now view the network topology of your deployments with just a few clicks. For example, the figure below represents the network topology of a simple web application deployed on Azure. With Network Watcher, you can now visualize the complete network topology of your application.
Typical issues with network connectivity is misconfiguration of user defined routes. Next hop provides the ability to get the next hop type and IP address based on a specified virtual machine, allowing you to investigate any route being black-holed and conditions caused by incorrect configuration.
Using the native capabilities offered by Network Watcher, you can build powerful end to end network monitoring scenarios using Azure services like Azure Automation, Azure Functions and Azure Log Analytics.
Your network monitoring needs can be augmented by open source tools such as CapAnalysis, Suricata and the Elastic Stack (Elasticsearch, Logstash and Kibana). We hope you will be able to leverage and build on the sample integration scenarios for visualizing packet captures, network intrusion detection and visualizing flow logs.
Your requirements and requests for an integrated solution and tooling is at the center of building this advanced network monitoring capability in Azure. Your feedback from using Network Watcher is vital to help steer the product development and eco system growth.
Wireless Network Watcher is free to download and use program that scans your network to show all devices that are connected to it. This program can detect devices and provide details like IP addresses, Mac Router, etc. One can also see the type of user that is connected to the network, and see the device name and the type of device it is.
Wireless Network Watcher is a program that monitors and tracks the number of devices that are connected to any particular wireless network. The program can see the number of devices that are connected, the type of device, the company of the network adaptor, the IP addresses, when the device was first and last detected, and more.
The program also lets you see if the device is active at the current moment, so one is able to determine how many devices as online at the same time. In case of slower download speeds, one can easily monitor the number of connected devices, and see if some can be disconnected to give less load to the wireless network. In case of any intruders too, or unsolicited devices connected, one can monitor them, and take the necessary actions accordingly.
It is possible to save information specifically, for instance, the edit option in the menu bar allows you to copy the lists of IP addresses, MAC addresses, or only the selected items. This allows you to collate specific information about devices that are connected to the network.
The best thing about the program is that it is really easy to use. One simply needs to download it, run the installer, and its good to go. Once the program opens, the window is really just a blank window, where you can run a quick scan, and the list of devices using the network show up. Details like IP Address, MAC details, type of device, etc. make it really easy to know more about the devices connected, and which device is connected currently.
A simple refresh using F5 or from the menu bar refreshes the view and detects if any new device has been disconnected or connected to the network. This is a great tracker in case the network is low on bandwidth and there are too many devices burdening the network, this slowing down the download speeds.
One can select and copy specific information about the devices connected like the IP Addresses, MAC addresses, etc, which can be useful to collate specific about the network performance. While this may seem to be a redundant function in a home environment, it works very well in a public or official domain. A small office network can easily be monitored using this device, as all the listed IPs can easily be tracked. Reports can easily be generated from the program, and be extracted in html/xml/csv/text file formats, for a systematic analysis of the network usage and to find the heavy devices that slow down the network.
Wireless Network Watcher it totally free to download and use, that is a big plus. Important information like network monitoring can easily be retrieved using this free software, and one does not need to pay anything to even extract the reports or the drilled-down information about IPs, MAC addresses, types of devices or any specifically selected items.
Some of the closest and most popular alternatives to Wireless Network Watcher include SoftPerfect Wireless Guard, Who Is On My Wifi, Fing, WiFi Protector, Nmap, Angry IP Scanner, ZenMap, FingBox, Dipiscan, Advanced IP Scanner, and many others. Programs like NMaps, Angry IP Scanner, ZenMap, etc, are also completely free to download and use, and their functionality are actually very similar to Wireless Network Watcher. Apart from some features here and there, the free programs offer similar kinds of information. For more advanced features, which can actually connect to the router, there are paid versions of the alternatives mentioned, and these have more actionable items and offer an even more detailed analysis of the network.
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