A good practice would be to install the Microsoft Network Monitor first and Microsoft Visual Round Trip Analyzer second to avoid compatibility issues.

The web developer has to select an available network connection in Visual Round Trip Analyzer that he wants to analyze. A click on the Start Netmon button starts the Netmonitor application which will from then on record the traffic on the selected network.

The user would then have to load the website or run a batch file that would simulate that and stop Netmonitor afterwards. The traffic will automatically be analyzed by the Visual Round Trip Analyzer software and displayed in the program’s interface.

The main chart lists the opened client ports, the domain and time it took to load the data. Hoovering over an entry will display detailed information about that traffic including headers, protcols, frames and sizes.

The Statistics tab will list file types, the total sizes, status codes and the average compressibility of them. More interesting than that is the All Files tab which gives – very – detailed information about files that have been loaded from external domains. This includes file sizes, download rate, Round Trips and Content Length.

Analysis is the last tab of the software program. It analyses various aspects of the site’s performance like Bandwidth Efficiency, Average File Size, Packet Loss or Whitespaces. The score ranges from A (best) to F (worst). Each parameter that has been rated is explained in a short paragraph. Hoovering the mouse over a paragraph will give information on the sites performance.