MONITOR BANDWIDTH USAGE – FOR EFFICIENT WORKING OF THE NETWORK
Network administrators are responsible for smooth running and efficient performance of the network they are assigned to take care of. If you are a network administrator and you are neglecting to monitor bandwidth usage in your network, you are exposing your network to great threats.
When various computers are connected in a network, there are chances that a particular computer may be eating up all the bandwidth provided for all the computers. In this case, the other computers may face serious slowness of net speed. As a network administrator, it is your responsibility to keep a close eye on the use of bandwidth by various computers/users connected in the network. This is of more importance in an organization where employees download heavy files containing multimedia, if proper attention is not given to use of right bandwidth by all the users, it can cause a major traffic jam and interruption in the system.
In order to sort this issue most of the network administrators get help from various software tools. There are a number of bandwidth monitors available in the market these days, you can purchase a reliable bandwidth monitor or you can also find a free one online. Make sure when you opt for the free tools to monitor bandwidth usage, you get a good one having all the right features. Your bandwidth usage tool should be able to provide you real time information on the use of bandwidth by each computer connected through the network and the total bandwidth consumed by the system as a whole. It should also be able to keep a record of all the reading, so that you can extract the past information any time you want.
Intelligent network administrators always rely on the use of the best tools to monitor bandwidth usage and make sure that the system works efficiently at all times.
How to Monitor Bandwidth Consumption
Bandwidth monitoring actually works to show and offer updates regarding update sheets, logs and speed. And what is great about it is that usage could be tracked and checked. It is also utilized to keep track of download and upload speed. It’s also responsible in correlating and collecting data that have been formed by a network analyzer. Bandwidth monitoring hardware and software provides built in functions like recorder for speed stopwatch, transfer rates and notification for usage; and it works along with numerous connections such as Ethernet, DSL, cable, modem and a lot more. It is also completely compatible with operating systems like Windows 2000, Windows 98, Windows 2003, Windows XP, and different other operating systems but the purpose are same to monitor bandwidth usage.
The other tools that might be offered that would work with bandwidth monitoring are gears like usage trends that keep track of traffic trends & user patterns which are tracked on daily, weekly, monthly usage or according to the user specific needs; and this is considered very useful in tracking bandwidth used & needed on a daily or weekly basis.
Another helpful tool to monitor bandwidth usage is for reports in monitoring the bandwidth, and it is very useful in order to come up with a plan as such a tool assist create a report for past week or a whole month's usage, current & average usage in order to forecast usage that’ll be required for coming days, weeks or sometimes even months. Bandwidth summary is actually another software that is utilized to summarize all present, past and future usage.
Summarily, monitor bandwidth tool plays an important role in your network uptime and a slight problem in the monitoring could create a devastating effect on your network which could lead to the downtime of your network.
How to do the monitoring of bandwidth
Going inexpensive on bandwidth is satisfactory when a corporation is first starting and the capital is really limited. Problems begin to arise when more users and hardware are added to network and you don’t have sufficient method to monitor bandwidth usage. You might notice that users begin to complain about slow response on network & complain of timeouts. Though prices of bandwidth continue to fall, few other bandwidth management solutions could be implemented to design a more cost effective way to provide more bandwidth to users of network.
If network has free access to protocol, then easy limits on extra services can create more available bandwidth. If users are streaming audio or videos, it could take a huge cut from bandwidth resources which are available. Heavy downloads like bit torrent or different other video files could abruptly suck up bandwidth from a network. These are some services that could be rejected to give your users more available bandwidth & save company some money. Security risks can also be issue for decreasing bandwidth. Sudden upsurges in network bandwidth usage can be a doubtful intruder or a possible Dos attack. This could be track down if you monitor bandwidth usage.
Occasionally, spikes in network traffic could be software or hardware related. Regardless, sudden severe spikes could block your network. A network administrator must be abruptly aware of suspicious activity on network, & a good network monitoring software could alert network administrator of doubtful activity. If network bandwidth resources are unexpectedly becoming limited, a fine network monitoring software is actually a critical component to properly analyze issue. If you monitor bandwidth usage with help of these monitoring hardware and software then there are very limited chances that you face any down time in your network. Vital times to watch network resources are between peak time utilization.