Enterprises around the world are adopting a variety of strategies to reduce bottlenecks, enhance network performance, and maximize ROI to keep pace with evolving hybrid infrastructures. While these policies vary from organization to organization and provide their own benefits, they can complicate how your IT infrastructure is monitored. When designing an effective monitoring strategy, it is important to understand the network throughput, bandwidth, traffic activity, health, and performance of individual components as well as the network as a whole. Network Bandwidth Monitoring simplifies the process by enabling network administrators to monitor bandwidth usage and performance on the network.
Network Bandwidth Monitoring Challenges
Understanding the quantity and quality of data moving across the network, monitoring network bandwidth performance, detecting network traffic anomalies, planning network bandwidth requirements, and preventing excessive spending are key tasks for every network administrator. However, trying to identify a tool that can easily and effectively monitor and manage these metrics is a challenge in itself. IT and network administrators can employ various strategies to overcome these challenges for better network bandwidth management.
Effective network bandwidth monitoring technology
In an extensive network monitoring scenario, most network administrators may neglect to track their network bandwidth utilization as well as changes in network traffic patterns. However, operations can crash when performance isn't up to its standards, or when the network is slow for an extended period of time.
Implementing some effective network bandwidth monitoring techniques can optimize network performance. These best practices that any network administrator can adopt will ensure that network bandwidth monitoring is simple and efficient.
- Establish the right QoS policy
- Split broadcast domain
- Conduct capacity planning regularly
- Set a network performance baseline
- Enable automatic reporting
- Analyze application-level traffic
- Group devices and IPs to view cumulative bandwidth performance
- Gain visibility into Wi-Fi devices and users
Establish the right QoS policy
QoS policies help network administrators prioritize applications and provide sufficient bandwidth to business-critical applications. For example, organizations with branch offices around the world need sufficient bandwidth to communicate via VoIP calls.
In this case, companies can prioritize VoIP traffic over other traffic, such as file sharing or messaging applications. Organizations should examine which of their operations require the most attention and set the right policies for low-latency sensitive and critical resources. To do this, they need to first classify applications based on their sensitivity to latency and delay. Additionally, it is recommended to validate strategies by closely monitoring them to ensure they are achieving optimal results.
Subdivided broadcast domain
When there are many devices in an organization, broadcast traffic from those devices is forwarded to all ports in the switch. Typically, when this happens, there is not enough bandwidth available for normal traffic. This will result in reduced performance.
IT administrators can use routers to segment broadcast domains. The router will drop unwanted traffic, saving bandwidth for other users. They can control access to traffic and optimize existing bandwidth without upgrading it.
Conduct capacity planning regularly
We cannot predict what new technologies will be launched tomorrow. We also often cannot predict the exact number of people who will join the organization as it grows. The best solution is to develop a strategy that supports the evolution of your organization's operations. This includes deploying cloud-based services that rely on reliable network performance.
Capacity planning helps IT administrators evaluate growth based on statistical information about historical traffic patterns and bandwidth utilization. Through this analysis, they can determine their organization's bandwidth requirements and choose to upgrade it, or predict and develop solutions to future bandwidth bottlenecks.
Whether targeting a specific department or branch, IT administrators can monitor network traffic patterns by traffic type (such as volume, speed, or utilization) to make decisions.
Set a network performance baseline
When it comes to monitoring, it is important to establish typical levels of normal bandwidth behavior. Since troubleshooting is all about speed and immediate remediation, rather than waiting for minor network issues to later become serious business operations issues, establish a performance baseline.
In addition to alerts, it helps proactively measure any downtime or unavailability. As a result, network administrators can begin fixing network bandwidth or traffic issues while ensuring productivity in the organization without shutting down operations.
Because IT administrators use performance baselines to define metrics that are considered normal, any change in network bandwidth can be understood as a warning and can help them resolve bandwidth-related issues immediately.
Enable automatic reporting
In addition to the real-time data a tool may provide, an important part of network bandwidth monitoring is that reports collected over time will help you understand network bandwidth usage over time and how network bandwidth trends are changing.
Rather than setting conditions for your reports and manually filtering the data each time, use a tool that automatically provides you with reports for a given date.
Analyze application-level traffic and adjust traffic based on priority
Users in the organization will not know whether the network bandwidth bottleneck problem is due to a faulty switch or an issue with other equipment. The only complaints you'll hear from users is about the app's performance. To troubleshoot, you need to understand application traffic and its performance, not expectations. It's a good idea to monitor application-level bandwidth usage to find the cause of network slowness.
For example, network engineers can use real-time bandwidth monitoring tools such as NetFlow Analyzer to find application-level bandwidth utilization and traffic patterns for Layer 4 and Layer 7 applications on an interface. As a result, they will know which application consumes the most bandwidth and can adjust traffic based on its importance.
Group devices and IPs to view cumulative bandwidth performance
Medium-sized organizations can have multiple departments or divisions. Having someone dedicated to monitoring all conversations on every device is tedious and inefficient. In some cases, network administrators may miss specific traffic details on any interface when looking at another device. A simple way to monitor bandwidth consumption is to group IP addresses. By creating IP groups based on departments, sites, or branches, network administrators can easily determine the total bandwidth consumption of a specific group, generate related reports, and set alerts.
Not only for easier monitoring, but grouping IP addresses helps delegate work to other sub-admins with accessibility controls. You can group them using port and protocol or DSCP.
Gain visibility into Wi-Fi devices and users
Today, Wi-Fi has become an essential part of network infrastructure for seamless productivity and reliability. However, the technical complexities of monitoring wireless device bandwidth utilization can be challenging. Having NetFlow-based WLC monitoring helps provide insight into the source and destination IP addresses, SSIDs, and ports associated with it.
Tip : It is recommended to use a wireless bandwidth monitoring tool, which provides reports on SSID related traffic, as well as access points with user, client IP and Mac address.
Network bandwidth monitoring tool
As network trends develop day by day, network bandwidth management should be effective to stay on track. NetFlow Analyzer network bandwidth monitoring and network traffic analysis tool for businesses of all sizes, which gives network administrators complete visibility and control over their networks.
- Real-time network bandwidth monitoring: visibility
- Find the cause of the failure: Use network bandwidth monitoring tools to identify bottlenecks
- Network Bandwidth Usage Trends: Historical Records
- Application bandwidth usage
- Threshold-based bandwidth usage alerts
- Generate and automate network bandwidth reports
Real-time network bandwidth monitoring
- View bandwidth usage by application, protocol, IP address group, and more.
- Visualize your network by creating custom dashboards with traffic charts, bandwidth trend reports, heat maps, top lists, and more.
- Track your entire wireless network including controllers, SSIDs, access points and QoS.
Find the cause of the fault
- Manage and track all web traffic activity, top users and conversations.
- Get alerts about attacks and other critical push notifications with the free mobile app to track your network on the go.
- Understand the entire distributed network.
Network bandwidth usage trends
- Use ML to predict network bandwidth usage trends to predict potential bottlenecks.
- Understand bandwidth capacity trends and IT needs ahead of time to avoid being caught off guard.
- Understand your business's bandwidth needs, pain points, link usage over time, and top applications used.
Application bandwidth usage
- Track application traffic and usage and get detailed statistics about every application running on your network.
- Map custom applications, set policies to shape application traffic, and deny or limit access to bandwidth hogs.
- Ensure smooth access and operation of media and other mission-critical applications.
Threshold-based bandwidth usage alerts
- Set threshold-based alerts to spot usage conflicts or unusual activity.
- Integrate with multiple internal and third-party applications to get notifications through media such as chat, SMS, email, alerts, traps, and tickets to meet your needs for faster response and troubleshooting.
- Avoid alert flooding by customizing alerts based on dependencies and severity.
Generate and automate network bandwidth reports
- Automate every step of reporting, from generation to dispatch.
- Advanced reports and charts to understand every activity, device, interface, application and element in your network.
- Monitor metrics on the go with scheduled reports to ensure effective resolution.
NetFlow Analyzer is a flow-based overall network bandwidth monitoring software that helps to manage the network smoothly and proactively monitor network devices across all geographical locations of the organization.