PsPing

If you ever tried to troubleshoot network without administrative rights, then you are probably aware of the number of challenges that arise from the fact that you are unable to access all components between the systems, especially the routers and firewall. Monitoring becomes even more difficult as your traffic leaves the network and you have less visibility over what is going on the wire.

Part of Microsoft's Sysinternals package, PsPing is a lightweight tool that allows you to perform various latency and bandwidth tests over TCP and UDP connections.

Similarly to the classic command, the tool sends five pings to determine whether the connection is up and running. It displays the response time for each along with the stats with high accuracy. The difference, however, is that the pings are measured via 10^-5, unlike the ping which uses 10^-3, offers histograms, iterations, control of interval, payload and non-stop with the same functionality for IPv4 and IPv5.

In case you want to test the TCP to check on a service for instance, then you can go for a specific port, port 80 being the default one. If you want to confirm that the target is up, simply run the test and append the :80.

Providing that you hold control over the client and server, so you can start up a listening service and connect it to the other end, you can even check out the latency of the connection. Lastly, if you want to learn more about how much data can pass between A and B, then you can do so via a test that uses 5000 packets of 8000 bytes each that target the server and specified TCP port.

In the eventuality that you want to perform quick tests to determine if the connection service is working when the ICMP is blocked by firewalls or you don't have Administrative rights, then perhaps PsPing could come in handy.