Styx - Network Analyzer Tool Copilot

Styx is a company that sells software applications to customer. The client is looking to create a new Windows-based application for use by the company’s Technical Support personnel to help troubleshoot and identify issues present within the customers’ environments that prevent the original system from functioning. The application will need to have the ability to perform the following basic operations:

1. Perform network connectivity tests between machines
2. Provide a profile of the network bandwidth and latency 
3. Perform a stress test on the customer’s network to identify the point when collision and re-transmissions begin increasing
4. Report on and compare against a predefined set of rules the DCOM configuration settings
5. Ability to collect network metrics over a length of time
6. Provide an easy, intuitive report of the metrics in an existing format (PDF), with an option to e-mail report to Tech Support
7. The application must have an easy-to-use, intuitive user interface and logic to be able to make a determination if the collected data does not match the company’s prerequisites for proper operation
8. The application will need to have basic help descriptions to allow new users to learn how to use these tools
9. (note that additional functionality may be exposed during the requirements gathering process)

Technical Implementation Details

• This application will need to support 32-bit as well as 64-bit Windows client and server operating systems.  the application should be implemented in .NET
• This application needs to be a standalone executable with no installation components, that will be able to run from a limited user account
• There are third party tools that meet some of these requirements.  However, we want this tool to be a custom solution. However, we can and should leverage existing third party libraries where necessary.

Copilot Opportunity

The purpose of this copilot opportunity is to create a game plan to implement the project defined above.   We are looking for a copilot who has experience / knowledge with implanting applications that deal with implementing / testing applications that run on networks.  For example: verifying ports are open, network connectivity firewalls, etc.