Network Bandwidth and Traffic

After designing a network, there are some tools that will be needed to help monitor network bandwidth and traffic. Monitoring these two areas of a network can provide a network engineer with information about how much bandwidth the company actually needs. This can help to save the company money, because they will know exactly how much bandwidth to buy from their ISP. Monitoring network traffic is just as important as monitoring bandwidth, if can help to prevent degrading application performance. So many companies experience employees complaining about slow access to applications and internet performance, monitoring network traffic will help to prevent these issues.  

Many network engineers today understand the value in good network management. Yet, some don't realize the possibility of monitoring the bandwidth of a network. There are a lot of tools available today on the market that can help with bandwidth monitoring. Bandwidth monitoring tools are best to use when your ISP provider has a limit on downloading and uploading. Most tools not only offer monitoring, they also offer detection of any suspicious activity on the network. I found a really great tool to monitor network bandwidth; it's made by Paessler the network monitoring company called the PRTG. The PRTG tool can monitor network device uptime, improve network performance, and track bandwidth usage. PRTG networking software uses SNMP, NetFlow, and packet sniffing to give the user a full overview of all the traffic on the network. The software allows you to analyze network traffic, as well as classify the traffic by a specific IP address, protocol or port. As I was doing my research, I realized that this tool had so many other features to offer like availability monitoring, performance monitoring, VOIP traffic monitoring, network analysis and troubleshooting, and Windows monitoring. The availability performance tool offers advanced PING test that will check to see if it can reach your website and network devices. Network analysis and troubleshooting tool can detect when a bottleneck will happen and any other possible failures early enough to do some troubleshooting before any downtimes occurs. This tool alone is very important to have available, because it can help to save the company money. The VOIP traffic monitoring offers a sophisticated VoIP monitoring tools that can check for round trip time, packet loss and packet delay variation. With most companies moving to VOIP phone systems, this tool will help to control quality. The Window monitoring tool can monitor Window system information like, file and folder changes, free disk space, file size, and CPU utilization. The PRTG comes in to editions, basic and commercial. The basic edition can be used in a home office or small business, this edition is free to download and use. If you need the more advanced services the Paessler offers, you can purchase a license for the commercial edition that cost about $440.