Bandwidth Monitoring
Why You Need a Bandwidth Monitor!
Many companies face the following issues: clients and employees moan about slow response times of applications and websites. Solving 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 software provides the answers.
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, a bandwidth monitoring software can also be used to alert administrators, if there are network load issues, if bandwidth tresholds are breached, etc.
Benefits of a Bandwidth Monitoring Software
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 monitoring software such as PRTG Network Monitor.
PRTG Network Monitor monitors bandwidth and the traffic in your network and provides you with detailed results - tables and graphs - and allows administrators to discern actual bandwidth usage issues based on multiple parameters, such as IP addresses, port numbers, protocols, etc., using either SNMP, packet sniffing or NetFlow collector sensors.
Bandwidth Monitoring Using Packet Sniffing And NetFlow Sensors
Bandwidth monitoring on basis of 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. Bandwith monitoring software that uses NetFlow receive preaggregated data forwarded by NetFlow-capable Cisco devices. PRTG supports as well packet sniffing as NetFlow for bandwidth monitoring (NetFlow Sensors are available as PRTG add-ons).
Free Bandwidth Monitoring Software
You can test our bandwidth monitoring software with the 30-Day-Trial-Edition. The Freeware Edition is completely free for personal and commercial use and may be downloaded at no cost. The Commercial Editions are required if you want to monitor more than ten sensors. Licenses for our bandwidth monitoring software PRTG Network Monitor start at $295 / €195.