Toolbar & Display

For all editions of VisualRoute, the main VisualRoute GUI upon start up is similar to figure 4.1 below. See your product help (choose 'Product Help...') from the 'Help' menu) for details relative to your licensed product.

Fig 4.1: VisualRoute Main GUI

The image above (Fig 4.1) is labeled 1-7. These options are described below:

1. Trace from - Choose a location to run a trace route from. This can be from your computer, one of the Visualware servers or you can add your own location.

2. Protocol - VisualRoute can also run a port probe to indicate whether HTTP, FTP, SMTP or Citrix servers are running at the end destination. If they are, performance information and further details will be shown.

3. Address - Type the address/IP you want to trace to, or pick a previously traced address/IP from the drop down menu, as shown below:

Recently Used IP Addresses Dialog Box

4. Port - Select the port on which VisualRoute should look for the application selected in the Protocol list.

5. Trace - Click this to perform a standard traceroute.

6. Plot - Using VisualRoute you can plot response times to a destination on a graph at 5 second or more intervals. To do this for an IP address/host name click this button. More information.

7. History - If you want to look back over previous data, whether it be traceroute data or ping graph data then click this button to perform a search. More information.

8. More Tools - There are a few types of test VisualRoute can perform. To chose one of these alterier tests click this drop down menu:

In the order they appear above:

Traceroute - Your standard traceroute.
Continuous traceroute - A traceroute that refreshes in real time giving you the latest live data.
Plot Responses - Same as the button described in number 6 it plots the response times to a destination on live graph.
Port Probe - This feature simply pings the port number for the IP address/domain you have chosen and reports back the status (if a connection was made, how long it took, what applications are running etc)
Network Scan - If the host you are monitoring does not respond, is the network to that host down, or is the host itself down? With Scan Network VisualRoute can answer this question.

9. Server Status - if you are running a Business or Server editions then you will have the server status shown in the top right hand corner.