Batfish vs iPerf2

Batfish is an open-source tool for analyzing network device configurations and validating network behavior. It works from configuration files, so core analysis does not require direct access to network devices. Teams can inspect deployed configurations and check planned changes before deployment. Checks cover undefined references, MTU and AAA settings, template compliance, sensitive-service reachability and expected traffic paths. Batfish can test whether end-to-end reachability survives any single-link or single-device failure, compare current and planned reachability, assess ACL or firewall changes and evaluate functional equivalence across vendors. Pybatfish provides a Python 3 SDK, and example Jupyter notebooks are available. An all-in-one Docker container bundles Batfish and notebooks. It runs on operating systems supporting Docker. Documented support includes Arista, AWS, Azure, Cisco, Juniper, Palo Alto Networks and SONiC, while Aruba, Dell Force10 and Foundry have limited support.

iPerf2 measures network traffic performance, including throughput, latency, link capacity, and responsiveness. Testing uses a client to send traffic to a server. It can generate TCP and UDP traffic in one-way, bidirectional, full-duplex, and simultaneous multi-stream configurations. Measurements include one-way delay, round-trip time, jitter, packet loss, and throughput. It supports IPv4, IPv6, and multicast, including source-specific multicast joins, and reports can include enhanced metrics or use CSV format. The project manual describes an Android client with live meters for throughput, latency, and congestion signals. The manual also describes permit-key HMAC authentication using a timestamped HMAC-SHA256 value, with replay limited by a configurable time window. Its Professional feature set includes server access gating and remotely enabled server-side latency histograms. Measurements happen at socket-level reads and writes, so lower-level protocol-header overhead is excluded. iPerf2 and iPerf3 are separate implementations and do not interoperate. It runs on Android, Linux, macOS, and Windows, and can be self-hosted. Both listed editions are free.