When enterprises plan their growth, ensuring sufficient room for infrastructure and budget is very essential. This covers every aspect ranging from capital to bandwidth to resource allocation. And our focus will be on bandwidth.
Bandwidth is a very critical element in a network since bandwidth hogs could lead to critical resources not being available when they are the most needed which would result in slogging of applications as well as employees.
Under normal circumstances, bandwidth availability is good enough to sustain business critical applications and we have ways of curtailing bandwidth usage for unnecessary applications during business hours. But, when it comes to expansion of the network, there would be a proportionate rise in the number of applications that consume bandwidth. And in all probability, there would be tough competition among very similar business critical applications to utilize the limited amount of available bandwidth. In this scenario, it is more like a war-of-the-worlds situation and when other bandwidth consuming applications that aren’t business critical come into the picture, chaos is all that remains.
Thus, it is very important for a network administrator to make provisions for enough bandwidth to accommodate new applications and the multitude of them that would need to use available bandwidth. But, how does one actually estimate the amount of bandwidth that would be required? Is there a formula to calculate it? Well, obviously the answer is no, for one simple reason that each network has its own traffic pattern and behavior and a generic formula wouldn’t apply for networks with different traffic patterns. And no amount of corollaries would suffice to answer this million dollar question.
But, ManageEngine’s Netflow Analyzer offers a solution, an answer to this million dollar question(through application growth report) and the cost of it is definitely not even a fraction of it. There is a feature called “Capacity Planning” which was designed with this in mind. This feature generates reports based on traffic trends in the network over a period of time. These reports give traffic details up to a granularity of 1 minute. This helps in analysis at a minute level and enables studying traffic trends accurately.
Consider this example where a bank has global presence and deals with millions of customers and handling sensitive data to the tune of billions of dollars on a per day basis. Gone are those days of customers visiting the bank to make transactions or to know account information. A lot of interfaces like the web, smartphone applications, ATM networks etc. are available for today’s customers to know their account information and constant availability of a secure network is mandatory for the bank to offer best in class services to its customer. In this case, when the number of customers keeps growing day-by-day, the network needs to be maintained in a stable manner and that would happen only when the traffic patterns are known. Through the capacity planning reports, it is possible to get detailed reports on traffic information at different times of the day and these reports are totally customizable. These reports come extremely helpful in 24/7 environments to sort out which type of traffic(VOIP , data etc.) has maximum volume during which part of the day.
To make the best and optimum use of available bandwidth and plan for the future bandwidth requirements, get the benefit of capacity planning reports and ensure that your network is reliable, stable and efficient. Download the 30 day trial of latest version of Netflow Analyzer 9.1 here.
Sai Sundhar Padmanabhan
Netflow Analyzer Team
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