How much bandwidth are the devices in your network using? With organizations increasingly dependent on their internet and IT network infrastructure, this is a question that haunts every network admin. Measuring bandwidth usage is not as simple as calculating the overall bandwidth consumption in a network; it involves multiple other factors such as the following:
Bandwidth requirements can be wildly overestimated or underestimated if there is a lack of proper analysis. While there are various bandwidth estimator tools available, they may not always be accurate, and in-depth analysis is the only way to achieve better understanding of a network. Capacity planning that involves bandwidth usage trend analysis over an extended period of time is key to improving accuracy in estimating a network's bandwidth needs.
By monitoring, measuring, and analyzing the bandwidth usage of all devices and users in a network, you can more easily recognize traffic patterns. This is beneficial in identifying anomalies in bandwidth usage or bandwidth hogs. Timely diagnosis of abnormalities in traffic behavior enables you to troubleshoot issues before they affect the entire network. Be it bottlenecks or other performance issues, ensuring all devices in your network are tracked helps you see who or what is hogging most of the bandwidth.
Your network speed and bandwidth rely on a number of elements like bandwidth speed that can highly affect your network’s performance and health. Your ISP could throttle your bandwidth based on data caps or to regulate traffic to avoid network congestion. This can be done by reducing your overall bandwidth availability or speed, restricting certain types of data that hog bandwidth or are bandwidth sensitive, and more. There are multiple ways to ensure your ISP is providing the bandwidth you're paying for. This includes testing bandwidth speed over a certain period of time on various devices as well as using billing apps or reports to calculate and generate custom bandwidth bill plans.
The total available bandwidth depends on your ISP service plan, and the way it is distributed depends on the demand from each user or device. VoIP calls, video conferencing, and other media traffic require the most bandwidth, and they are also highly sensitive to network issues. Any lag in these services is more easily noticeable than in other services such as email, report generation, or file downloads. QoS settings and other traffic shaping methods can be used to establish the priority of business-critical applications as well as block or limit the use of bandwidth-hogging apps.
Cisco's Annual Internet Report forecasts that the number of IP devices will be over three times the global population by 2023. Monitoring source and destination IP addresses enables you to determine the traffic and measure bandwidth usage from an individual host passing through a specific interface. This in turn helps determine the geolocation of the IP address or host, making it easier to track down bandwidth hogs and malicious users, especially in distributed networks.
Any network, however large or complicated, is susceptible to network security attacks. A denial-of-service attack, or DoS attack, is where the attacker floods the targeted machine or network resource with a huge number of requests to overload the system, disrupting the host's services and transiently or indefinitely shutting down the machine or network resource, making it inaccessible to its intended users.
In a distributed DoS attack (DDoS attack), this incoming traffic flooding the victim is generated from many different sources. This effectively makes it impossible to stop the attack simply by blocking a single source.
The only way to avoid an attack as severe as a DDoS attack is to carefully record and study the size, type, and frequency of DoS attacks. Identifying and mitigating these attacks before they can cause damage involves constantly monitoring network traffic and measuring bandwidth usage over longer periods of time to identify anomalies.
Measuring and monitoring bandwidth usage requires tracking every single device or user, mission-critical or otherwise, in your network. The complexity of this process increases with the size of the network. A bandwidth measuring tool that is not only a bandwidth meter but also monitors network traffic and provides insights into the network's bandwidth consumption can make measuring bandwidth usage more efficient. Picking the right tool based on network requirements, whether it is free or paid, will also help you better manage your network.
ManageEngine NetFlow Analyzer is a flow-based, highly scalable bandwidth measuring tool and network traffic analyzer that monitors and analyzes devices, interfaces, applications, and users in your network to provide comprehensive insights.
NetFlow Analyzer monitors and analyzes network traffic and provides real-time visibility into traffic patterns and network performance with reports. It also helps you drill down into device details to find the source and destination IPs to identify which part of your network is being used by whom, and when.
NetFlow Analyzer helps measure bandwidth usage on network, identify and plan your future bandwidth requirements with its Forecast and Capacity Planning reports. It ensures network performance is measured over time and that your business is prepared for and comfortable managing network growth when necessary.
NetFlow Analyzer's traffic shaping features help you identify and control applications using the network's bandwidth. It helps ensure that the right applications are utilizing bandwidth, and also enables you to view and validate how the QoS policies affect these applications.
With the global cybersecurity market size forecasted to grow to $345.4 billion by 2026, as reported by MarketsandMarkets, it is critical that you have a tool that can perform behavior analysis and anomaly detection, and give you complete visibility into your network. NetFlow Analyzer's Advanced Security Analytics Module constantly monitors and measures network bandwidth usage to identify and classify anomalies and attacks such as DDoS attacks, ports or scans, and suspicious traffic based on predefined algorithms, helping you mitigate them before they affect the network and its users.
- Raul Borges
Network Administrator, Praxair
Monitor 2 interfaces forever with Free Network Bandwidth Monitor
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Set pre-defined threshold settings based on utilization, duration and frequency to effectively monitor network bandwidth.
Ensure fair billing from your ISP. You could also use it for chargeback in your different departments
Assess future network requirements based on capacity planning reports.
Unearth the root cause of your network troubles and troubleshoot issues faster.
Monitor critical factors affecting VoIP, Video performance and ensure best-class service levels. Ensure seamless WAN connectivity through WAN RTT monitoring.
Validate the effectiveness of your QoS policies using CBQoS reports from NetFlow Analyzer. Prioritize your network traffic accordingly.