Network Bandwidth Monitoring Challenges

 

Top 5 pain points in monitoring network bandwidth: A brief report

As an organization's network expands, the applications utilized by the labor force often also evolve. To maintain a healthy and stable network, you need to monitor traffic patterns, analyze logs, and eliminate bottlenecks in every physical hardware element, like routers, switches, and firewalls. However, network bandwidth monitoring is not easy. Here are some network bandwidth monitoring challenges that any network admin faces.

  1. Finding the root cause of bandwidth issues
  2. Allocating adequate bandwidth
  3. Obtaining granular visibility
  4. Controlling voice and media traffic
  5. Implementing effective threat detection

1. Finding the root cause of bandwidth issues

Many network administrators are confronted by a common complaint from the users: the network is so slow that they can't access the applications. To get to the core of the issue and shorten troubleshooting time, you need a tool that provides packet level analysis

A comprehensive, real-time bandwidth monitoring tool, like ManageEngine NetFlow Analyzer, helps you uncover the root cause of the problem. Its deep packet inspection (DPI) mechanism helps you find the ART and NRT, and determine if the problem is with the application side or the network side.

2. Allocating adequate bandwidth

Bandwidth allocation is a problem prevalent in many growing enterprises. They often need to allocate available bandwidth to different departments to meet the organization's expanding requirements.

Knowing department-level bandwidth utilization and deducing its requirements can be challenging. Inadequate software, that doesn't provide these insights might prompt an IT admin to either allocate less bandwidth, which can cause downtime, or allocate too much bandwidth, which is not cost-effective and results in resources being under-utilized.

It is highly recommended that you use bandwidth monitoring software which gives you entire visibility into bandwidth utilization by departments , branch offices, and sites.

3. Obtaining granular visibility

Apart from gaining visibility into the entire network, viewing granular visibility is an important aspect that many tools lack. Granular visibility provides you with accurate traffic and time statistics for the source, either an interface or device.

For instance, an administrator gets a full view of an interface's traffic for the whole day. Without any granular visibility, the accuracy of the traffic data collected will be uncertain. Admins won't know the traffic details with respect to time, and therefore they won't be able to discover traffic trends, and detect any internal or external security attacks when a sudden spike occurs.

By default, NetFlow Analyzer provides you with granular visibility up to a one-minute average, which can be changed to a 5-minute or a 15-minute average. With these flexible options, you can manage your network bandwidth by prioritizing the traffic or blocking selective WAN traffic.

4. Controlling voice and media traffic

Let's assume that your organization is facing network performance issues, especially when the employees are in a video conference. Since media traffic is latency-sensitive, you need to check many aspects, like if there is insufficient bandwidth, packet loss, or effective QoS policies in the network.

If there is no visibility into the network to check which aspect needs your attention, troubleshooting might take hours or even days, and impact the productivity of your organization.

Many network monitoring tools might not give you these deep insights into the network traffic, and you will have trouble knowing the problem. Since VoIP and video calls are sensitive to disturbances like jitter, latency, packet loss, etc., you need an IP Service Level Agreement (IP SLA) monitoring tool that will provide you with details like round-trip time (RTT), jitter, availability, latency, and Mean Opinion Score (MOS). With these parameters, you can compare how the values have changed, as opposed to the set threshold limit.

5. Implementing effective threat detection

Troubleshooting a security concern is about how fast you act once you sense unusual behavior persisting in your network. Though there are firewalls, and IDS, they can only match the predetermined digital signatures, analyze packets, and detect basic network attacks.

To a certain extent, this can be effective when you know the avenues that might be vulnerable, what we call the known attacks. But security attack strategies are developing everyday with new technology, and you need to be prepared for zero-day attack

What is your solution to an unknown security attack? You might not know until the problem becomes severe. That's why you need a tool that performs network behavior anomaly detection to provide you with insights by correlating similar events, and helping you find unusual traffic spikes. These aspects help you detect zero-day intrusions and isolate them as soon as possible.

Eliminate the challenges in network bandwidth monitoring with NetFlow Analyzer

NetFlow Analyzer, is an all-in-one bandwidth monitoring software that supports extensive flow technologies like NetFlow, sFlow, JFlow, IPFIX, and Netstream. It helps you monitor how your bandwidth is being consumed, by who, and when. You can view the traffic patterns by applications, ports or protocols, and curb the network bandwidth performance inefficiencies with holistic visibility.

Apart from monitoring, you can carry out seamless bandwidth management by traffic shaping with QoS policies, generating various traffic reports for different sources, configuring devices, and more. Explore the extensive bandwidth monitoring advantages on your own by downloading a free, 30-day trial of NetFlow Analyzer. You can also schedule a free personalized demo to receive answers to your product related questions from a solutions expert.