NetAlly LRAT-2000-KIT LinkRunner AT 2000 Network Tester. Used one on EBay for $1299.
My previous boss, a network enthusiast, really liked it. I used it a few times but not enough to develop a strong opinion of it.
Just enough to say it did enough troubleshooting in a closed area to earn its place there. He liked it would help diagnose PoE, and he loved it would tell him what port on the Cisco switch he was plugged into.
Personally I had looked into a "Tesifier" back when 1GbE copper was first becoming popular. I learned the NICs were getting sophisticated power sensing and levelling built into them and they probably had better diagnostic and compensation engines in them than I would get from anything below a multi-thousand dollar piece of equipment, and I'd be better off trying to maybe buy a better quality NIC and tap into the diagnostics it had.
Fast-forward several years (so, 2016) and I'm trying to find out why 10GbE copper is having problems making a run through a data center including patch panels. I do the research and the HPE server NIC has a lot of performance parameters available. For the life of me I cannot get an HPE support engineer to give me a tool to access them, though I explain to him all this is in the NIC. (I did not find any Red Hat package that would help access the info, but I expected HPE servers to have a tool already.)
I go over to the switch itself. It has power levels, BERT, dropped bits history, everything a good network analyzer would have. Plus, the network support engineers know this. And, it has a web-based GUI to see it.
So, I'd recommend the Linkrunner as kind of the max you want in a standalone device, and buying a sophisticated switch above that, because at least the one I worked with has very good signal diagnostics built into it already.
