Anyone have a visual network discovery tool do display it all?

Hi everyone!

It's me again, your least common denominator guy in networking. If you can explain it to me, you can explain it to anyone. I LOVE SevenForums because this is such an awesome community with supporting stars who have written many great tutorials.

I come to you today asking for a recommendation for a visual tool to use on my home network (or is it networks?) to discover devices and find connectivity paths. I'm a windows 7 pro user (that's 7 pro, not that i'm not a pro user, but hey.) So, I have used the usual Network and Sharing Center, but find it only shows me a bit at a time. This is a problem.

A problem? Well yes, I have a few oddities going on and want to sort things out. First some general connection info: I have two ISPs as I am currently in transition from one to the other and satisfied with neither just yet. I have both ethernet and wi-fi. Eventually, I hope to have a dual connection off my router to assure connectivity, uptime, bandwidth (or should I say capacity?) etc.

Now, some of my current issues are sorting out why I cannot print sometimes but can other times (my printer is on a bridge), but to remind you, I am starting out here just looking for a good visual investigative tool. I'll log the specific problems in another thread. But to demonstrate some of the complexity, if the dual network described above is not enough, I have a couple images to show you about things I need to investigate and get working properly. // Images attached

So, any suggestions for an awesome discovery tool that is visually oriented? Thanks in advance!


UPDATE: Tools I have researched so far...
- For completeness, mentioning that Microsoft's Network & Sharing Center can see SOME devices, not all and report one visually, but one subnet at a time, where it understands them.
- Found WhatsUpGold from IPSWITCH but it seems to require a more powerful server as a minimum configuration (or so it reports), so ... no progress on this one.
- Tried AngryIPScanner, but again, you have to know the subnet in advance, but you can choose a range of subnets, though it is noisy about what is NOT there. Perhaps there's a way to reconfigure that so that only meaningful results are returned. Not sure.
- Tried Trogon MAC Scanner which nicely lists the MAC Addrs found on a subnet, and while you have to manually choose one subnet at a time to search, it makes nice suggestions about subnets. It was nice enough to provide device names which helped me find a router I was uncertain of the address of. Line item data, not graphical, but it;s only saying what is out on a subnet, not what you can connect to. W
- Trying to install and run SpiceWorks, but it has been nearly an hour long progress bar to my first application run. They are "picking, sorting, and chopping the peppers" but no results yet.

Look here: 10 great free downloads for your network | Computerworld

The first one listed, Network Magic, sounds like it may be what you want.

Rats, looks like that one is no longer available.

Edit: Try Spiceworks. I'm installing it now to check it out. A bit complicated as it installs a Apache web server and sql database but it's free so may do the job. I'll know soon.

Nope, way to complicated and asks for too much information for me to use, sorry. I'm uninstalling it now.

Installing Spiceworks, yes, it's a bit complicated and wants very personal information for the community. It seems to be a big market lead generation organization. Watch their intro video and all the tell tale signs are there.

The product did not work as installed. I got errors launching it that said the default configuration was wrong. Nice! Drive people to the community where your data is collected for lead generation. Nice touch, guys! Evil, but clever.

Anyway, twiddling the choices, I eventually found choices that would work and configured the firewall to let it through and have been waiting about 30 min for it to finish doing something or other with a progress bar.

I should know more soon.

Ztruker said:

Try Spiceworks....
Nope, way to complicated and asks for too much information for me to use, sorry. I'm uninstalling it now.

You were right. I should have listened.

GokAy said:

How is your network physically connected?

So, yeah, when I have things sorted out I will put together a diagram, or better yet, one of these tools will help. I started with a cable modem and router, an RT-N66U which I had for ages but I have been seeing errors recently - wasn't sure if it's ASUS related or COMCAST related. However, they still appear after Comcast changed out the modem and router, suggesting my dreaded ISP may be the issue.

Furthermore my location is a cell phone dead zone so I use an ASUS TM-AC9100 as a CellSpot to get calls. TM says put it in front of the router, but I'd rather keep it behind the router for security purposes.

Now, with Comcast having DOUBLED my internet costs in the last 8 months , I started looking at other ISPs and now have a second network. Originally I was thinking to use the RT-N66U which allows running off both networks. This would be great because while Comcast speeds are good, the infrastructure fails in bad weather (as soon as it rains.) So now I am just looking to transition off.

With all the recent changes, I wanted to make sure I was catching everything so that I could get the network configurations similar before I attempt to discuss the outrageous price hikes with Comcast. Been there before. I hear they make it nearly impossible to disconnect service, but I dream of unplugging everything and getting out my wire cutters. I may start sleeping with them under my pillow.