NetDiag+
NetDiag+ 1.4.9: Health Score, three new tools, and results you can send as a picture
Most people do not want a table of latencies. They want to know whether their connection is fine, and if it is not, whose fault it is. 1.4.9 answers that in one run.
Health Score
Press Run, wait about forty seconds, and you get a number from 0 to 100 and three rows under it: Wi-Fi, Router and ISP, each marked OK, suspect or at fault. Nothing leaves the phone; the score is computed from the numbers measured in that one run.
The run has three phases, one after another. First the line is left idle and the app measures latency, jitter and loss to the nearest internet roots and to your own router. Then it loads the line, first downloading and then uploading, while pinging the router and the internet at the same time — this is the bufferbloat test, and it now also measures your speed. Last, ten more pings check whether latency came back down. The phases cannot run at the same time: a speed test fills the queue, and a full queue distorts the latency you are trying to measure. That distortion is exactly what the load phase is looking for.
The score adds up five parts, and every row expands to show its thresholds:
- Responsiveness under load, 35 points — the bufferbloat grade. It carries the most weight because "it becomes unusable when someone else downloads" is the complaint most people actually have.
- Latency, 20 — round trip to the nearest internet root with the line idle.
- Stability, 20 — jitter and packet loss with the line idle.
- Speed, 15 — download and upload from the load phases, on a gentler curve for cellular.
- Local link, 10 — how quickly and evenly your router answers.
The attribution follows where queues physically form. A router that already answers slowly points at Wi-Fi. Latency that explodes under upload but not download is your router's own buffer, which smart queue management (SQM) on the router fixes. Delay or loss past a healthy router is on the provider's side, and the report is the evidence for a ticket. Health Score also has its own trend chart, so a change you made to the router shows up as a line, not a memory.
More accurate bufferbloat grading
Adding speed to the bufferbloat test exposed a problem in it. The download phase requested a single very large file from the load server, and the server had been refusing requests of that size. The phase ran, but it did not load the line. Grades from versions 1.4.5 to 1.4.8 therefore measured the upload direction only, and the "queue on the provider's downstream path" verdict could not appear. The download phase now streams the line in chunks for the whole window and counts every byte, so a load that fails can no longer look like one that worked. If you saved bufferbloat results before 1.4.9, read their download rows as an idle line.
Three new tools
- VPN Check — is a VPN active right now, how the internet sees you, which NAT type you are behind, and whether your system's DNS answers agree with an encrypted resolver. One verdict: clean, one issue, or several.
- HTTP Headers — every response header and the whole redirect chain, http to https, apex to www, with the time to each answer.
- Reverse DNS — the name behind an IP address, for a traceroute hop or a router log.
Share as image
Bufferbloat, the Latency Dashboard and Health Score can now share a result as a picture, next to text and PDF. Text goes into a ticket. A picture goes into the family chat, which is where "the internet is broken again" usually gets discussed.
Also
- The Latency Dashboard offers a rating link after a run that measured something.
- NetDiag+ launches on Product Hunt on Thursday, 1 October.
Free · 27 tools · one-time purchase removes ads · no subscription