Servers play a critical role in a network's performance, which means maintaining their optimal capacity is essential. Enterprises need to provide ample agility, security, and flexibility with AI, ML, and cloud technologies weaved into their IT; in this regard, and server traffic monitoring has become imperative. Monitoring communication regularly, tracking the context of traffic, and identifying bottlenecks allows you to understand how the server is handling your network's data and if there are any security issues that need to be addressed.

Without server traffic monitoring, you risk:

• Not knowing if servers have the required bandwidth capacity. Without knowing how much bandwidth is being utilized, identifying lag or performance degradation incidents before they impact the entire network is a major challenge.
• Being unable to find which applications are accessing the server. Your server can be used by many applications, but knowing which ones matter the most to your organization can be a herculean task. This lack of control in gaining app-centric traffic can leave non-essential bandwidth-hogging applications draining the entire network's bandwidth.
• A lack of insights on network conversations for security. Malware outbreaks, hacking attempts, and server problems can happen at any time. No visibility on traffic spikes will negatively impact the network as a whole in the long run.
• Not knowing when the server traffic exceeds its capacity, which puts operationals at risk of being slowed down or stopped altogether, creating major issues for your organization in terms of finance and reputation.
• Not knowing when to upgrade your server plan based on fluctuating traffic needs. The needs of an IT infrastructure can change profoundly based on the number of users. Without proper server traffic monitoring, enterprises may spend needlessly on the wrong solutions, failing to mitigate the risk of unexpected downtime.

NetFlow Analyzer: The unified server traffic monitoring tool

NetFlow Analyzer is flow-based bandwidth monitoring software that supports multiple technologies like NetFlow, sFlow, J-Flow, IPFIX, and so on. As a multi-vendor-based solution for traffic analysis needs, it also monitors traffic of non-flow exporting devices, like servers, with the new NetFlow Generator agent.

NetFlow Generator: The all-new server traffic monitor

NetFlow Generator is an agent-based feature available in the Network Packet Sensor module, helping organizations monitor network traffic of non-flow exporting devices. NetFlow Generator operates by translating data packets into NetFlow packets and sending them to NetFlow Analyzer's listener ports to show network traffic patterns and provide bandwidth usage reports.

• Get real-time server traffic insights
• Detect cumulative bandwidth usage
• Prioritize server traffic for critical applications
• Receive alerts on unusual traffic usage
• Plan upgrades wisely with server traffic reports

• Monitor without blind spots and complexity

NetFlow Analyzer offers visibility into the traffic of all kinds of servers, including applications and database servers, to access the quality and quantity of available network resources. You can find the server's top conversations, IP addresses, and applications to derive insights on the context of bandwidth utilization. With this detailed server traffic monitoring, you can identify, analyze, and generate reports on performance and security, all within a single console.

• Create logic groups for cumulative traffic monitoring

As an enterprise scales, the major issue lies in identifying how the network is being used and what's causing errors and lag. This is especially difficult when you have to go through thousands of interfaces to analyze traffic. With NetFlow Analyzer's server traffic monitor, you can create logical groups by devices, applications, access points, interfaces, and IP addresses based on branches or departments, and get an overall analysis of all traffic data. With such grouping, you can monitor traffic on servers> to keep track of how critical departments of your organization are consuming bandwidth and allocate resources accordingly.

• Control bandwidth and enhance efficiency

Having sufficient bandwidth for your organization is essential to deliver reliable network speeds. But there may be a lot of applications running daily in your organization, and ensuring that the business-critical ones get enough bandwidth is imperative. Traffic shaping with NetFlow Analyzer allows you to prioritize traffic by modifying policies based on factors such as packet delay and latency, ensuring support for important business services. You can apply policies and measure their effectiveness with class-based quality of service (CBQoS) graphs that provide pre-policy and post-policy traffic reports.

• Set server traffic alerts and reduce overhead

Taking proactive approach to monitoring the traffic on server is an essential step to keeping it reliable and error-free. Server failures, like slowness in processing requests, can create a domino effect to other elements in your organization, and you need to know about incidents before they grow in intensity. NetFlow Analyzer's threshold-based server traffic alerts give you the advantage of defining a baseline traffic behavior by different types like volume, speed, and utilization, and alerts you when there's a deviation from this. With the intelligent traffic control features, you can configure the threshold limits with corresponding severity.

• Forecast network objectives with capacity planning

Monitoring and planning network growth go hand in hand as enterprises scale. By analyzing the server traffic data over time, you can draw conclusions about what's necessary for your network to function without hitches in the future. NetFlow Analyzer's billing, capacity planning, and forecast reports use dynamic technologies like AI and ML to predict bandwidth utilization and application behavior over time. This enables you to spend your budget only for the upgrades that matter the most.

The scope of enterprise server traffic monitoring

Server traffic management involves analyzing the percentage of network bandwidth utilized so that you can regulate your network's usage to ensure easy accessibility for all business-critical operations. Reliable uptime and availability are the core objectives for many enterprises, especially distributed networks.

Server traffic monitoring helps distributed enterprises to:

• Validate the network's actual quality and identify issues.
• Find the faulty endpoint with response time analysis.
• Know how connected devices and interfaces utilize the network.
• Track baseline behavior and troubleshoot bandwidth issues as early as possible.
• Detect network traffic anomalies to avoid cyberattacks.
• Generate reports on current usage trends to plan upgrades.