How to monitor packet transfers on global network

It is not an exaggeration to say that using the Internet and World Wide Web have become common household activities. While the end users do not care how the information gets transferred between end points on a global network, system designers, software and hardware developers, and network managers need to be concerned about the packet based information transfers between the end points. There is a great need to know about how the packets are moving on the network, their relative time responses as the packets travel towards the destination station, and the IP (Internet Protocol) addresses of the intermediate nodes, to qualify the data transfers. Unix and the Windows based platforms are very popular for the Web and Internet related information transfer activities. The authors discuss some popular and very useful connectivity commands which will help the users to monitor the network behavior and show practical case studies of how these can be used to monitor the data transfers and the time involvement.