Today there is a wide variety of troubleshooting tools for analyzing network problems.
Cable testers, designed simply to register common electrical faults, may include sophisticated time domain reflectometry and digital signal processing to precisely localize fault conditions and rapidly examine performance over a broad bandwidth. SNMP consoles, once found only on management platforms such as OpenView and SunNet Manager, are now commonly supplied with individual devices. They are also attached to Web servers, and used for network drawing and documentation tools, as well as built into handheld diagnostic devices. As a result, many of the tasks that once required a protocol analyzer can be resolved with other tools. Nevertheless, most of the hardest and subtlest problems still require protocol analysis for complete resolution.