Perform Network Scanning & Analysis from iOS with Fing

If you’ve ever wished there was a good network scanning utility for iOS you’ll be glad to find Fing. Fing is a free and powerful app for iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch that provides detailed network discovery and analysis tools right on your iDevice.

Fing will quickly find all devices connected to a wi-fi or ethernet network, displaying their IP address, MAC address, share name (NetBIOS), vendor name, whether or not it’s a file server, whether a device is up or down, and there’s even a port scanner so you can see what services are running on a device and which ports they’re on. There’s even Wake On LAN support so you can wake up connected devices that support the feature.

• Get Fing from the App Store (free)

The primary Fing display shows the results of a network scan, displaying devices, their share names, IP’s, and MAC addresses:

Fing makes an excellent tool to help setup networks and troubleshoot devices, and anyone who’s had to dig around in the System Preferences to find Mac IP and MAC addresses on multiple machines, or in Network Settings on a bunch of iPhone, iPad, or Apple TV’s to find that same type of important network information knows it’s kind of a pain to manually retrieve all that information from different sources. Instead with Fing you can quickly see all of that for connected devices, saving you a lot of time, and you can even email detailed information so you don’t even have to gather it all together yourself.

Tapping onto any device reveals additional networking information:

From there you can scan for active services and open ports on individual network devices:

You can even tweak settings in Fing to add additional services that aren’t listed, so if you have something specific with a unique port running on a specific device or network, it’ll know to look for that as well.

Fing is a great addition to any users networking toolkit, it’s simple to use yet powerful, and is an excellent iOS based utility to use alongside Mac utilities like the stellar connecting monitoring app Private Eye, the OS X Wi-Fi optimizer feature, and the built-in Wi-Fi Diagnostics tool stumbler. Combine them all and you’ll have many of your networking utility needs covered, whether you’re an advanced user or just a networking newbie. The only complaint I can find about Fing is the lack of general networking tools like ping and traceroute, and the app hasn’t been updated for the larger screen iPhone 5 yet, otherwise it’s rock solid and well worth downloading.