Bandwidth Monitoring
Bandwidth Monitoring
Many companies face the following issues: clients and employees moan about slow response times of applications and websites. To solve this challenge is often more difficult than generally assumed. Is it the core router or the department switch, are the disks slow or does the server need more CPU-power? Are the leased lines the bottleneck? Or are there applications you would not expect to eat up your bandwidth such as file-sharing, streaming or skype?
Bandwidth monitoring basically entails tracking the bandwidth usage of leased lines, network connections, network devices (routers, switches, etc.), and the like. Bandwidth monitoring allows to not only discern the actual amount of bandwidth being used (e.g. for billing purposes) but also to proactively trace usage trends, bottlenecks, and connectivity errors, making it easier for network administrators to decide how to balance and route their traffic and decide what purchases are necessary to improve the flow of data within the network. Furthermore, bandwidth monitoring can also be used to alert administrators if there are network load issues, if bandwidth tresholds are breached, etc.
Understanding bandwidth and resource consumption is the key to better network management:
- Avoid bandwidth and server performance bottlenecks
- Find out what applications or what servers use up your bandwidth
- Deliver better quality of service to your users by being proactive
- Reduce costs by buying bandwidth and hardware according to actual load
For a quick and accurate analysis you need a bandwidth monitor. PRTG Network Monitor monitors the traffic in your network and provides you with detailed results - tables and graphs.
PRTG allows administrators to monitor bandwidth and discern actual bandwidth usage based on multiple parameters, such as IP addresses, port numbers, protocols, etc., using either SNMP, packet sniffing or NetFlow collector sensors. Packet sniffing sensors generally use the host machine's network card but can be configured to use monitoring ports found on some networking devices using port mirroring / forwarding in order to monitor the overall network bandwidth utilization. Netflow collectors receive data forwarded by Netflow-capable Cisco devices using Netflow collector licenses (available as PRTG add-ons).