Fing network scanner app: Review

Fing is billed as a ‘super-fast network scanner’, and that’s pretty much what it does, at least originally. Fing itself offers network scanning of the local subnet, device port scanning, and connectivity testing to local or remote addresses. Pretty simple stuff. However, the execution is slick and offers some nice additions to assist in keeping track of the growing list of devices in our homes. 

Firstly, for each device it detects, it will attempt to identify the device based on some known identifiers. It does a pretty good job and greatly helps in thinning out the list that you need to track down further. Once you’ve identified a device, you can optionally name it (and select a handy icon from a large library), and give it a location to help you keep track.

Second, Fing will keep track of the history of devices over time, and can keep an event log of when things were first noticed and when it saw them go on or offline. This can help track things down, but also acts as a diagnostic of potential issues on the network. You can ping the device to test it’s connection stability, and do a port scan to check for vulnerable open ports. Of course, the device details page lists all the pertinent info about it’s network settings, IP, MAC address, OS, any NetBIOS or Bonjour IDs detected, if it’s hosting a file share, and so forth.

Additionally, you can flag devices as ‘Critical’ or ‘Favorite’ and they will be so marked in the device list. You can set Fing to notify you on state change for each device, so critical devices can be actively monitore (your smart home hub of choice, or security devices for example).