I’m surprised I’ve not heard more about Jperf in the various network management forums I surf.  It’s a surprisingly easy tool to use and quite useful, maybe to easy…  Jperf is just the GUI front end for Iperf.

Let’s start off with the interesting stuff, here’s an image of a bandwidth trace I done from home to a server in the office.  Basically it’s showing I’m getting about 0.5M and that it varies a bit.

The measurement is done between the two end points, my PC @ home and the server in the office.  Jperf (or Iperf) needs to be installed at both locations, although that only takes a couple of minutes.  Once installed you need to setup one location as the client and one as the server, in this case the far end (the office server) is acting as the server.  Then you enter the far end address and “Run Iperf!” – that’s it!

So why would you use it?  Well I had the situation where users were complaining about network performance in a remote office, by getting this installed on a device at that location I get to see how the link between my device and that location is working.  So if you’re able to get this installed at key locations in your network you’ll get to see performance between those locations.  For example you could install Iperf near your Exchange servers (maybe even on it!), and run tests to it from your office locations to get an indication of network performance.

As you’ll see from the image you also get a number of options that you can configure, including UDP instead of TCP.  In reading stuff on the web you can use these options to help understand how the network works in different scenario’s, although I’ve not investigated that yet.

So it’s a simple but useful tool, well worth looking at.

As this tool can be run from the command line (Iperf) it’s probably possible to script it and automate, but that’s for another day…  And so is looking at Cisco IP SLA.