Having slow internet speed can cause huge frustration among the users in an organization. We know how effective use of bandwidth can influence productivity in your business. Bandwidth is the volume of information that can be sent over an internet connection in a measured amount of time calculated in megabytes per second.
For instance, let’s assume your organization’s network bandwidth is a canal and your data is the ships sailing through it. In a narrow canal, only one or two ships can pass through at a time, while a wider canal can let more ships sail through in the same amount of time. Similarly, in your network, the lower the bandwidth, the slower data passes through.
Different organizations have different bandwidth needs. There is no standard definition of good or bad bandwidth. By recognizing bandwidth issues quickly, bandwidth monitoring saves your organization’s resources and time while enhancing productivity. For instance, you can see which applications are consuming the most bandwidth during high-use hours and control the bandwidth usage of non-mission critical applications by implementing bandwidth usage policies.
Video streaming platforms and services that demand a static stream of data are major bandwidth hogs that can cause jitter and latency issues. Other issues bandwidth hogs causes are poor quality of VoIP calls, a higher risk of malware and other security threats, and poor network configurations implemented in an attempt to limit bandwidth use. It’s important to monitor your bandwidth to ensure that business-critical applications and services aren’t impacted by low bandwidth.
Check and analyze bandwidth usage at regular intervals to detect and troubleshoot issues. Organizations should be able to forecast bandwidth requirements based on their users’ habits. It is essential to determine the bandwidth requirements of your organization based on both the local area network and wide area network.
Why do organizations find it difficult to track bandwidth usage?
Growing organizations are consistently expanding their user bases, and rolling out new applications and services to meet the needs of these users. It’s important to ensure bandwidth is being used optimally so that users have a good experience and high quality of services. Different services and applications have different bandwidth requirements, so network administrators must allocate the right amount of bandwidth for specific applications and services accordingly.
An organization’s network can experience slowdowns caused by spikes in bandwidth usage, but whether the spike is a result of legitimate or malicious activity isn’t always apparent for network administrators at a glance. With the right bandwidth usage monitoring tool, network administrators can detect network anomalies and fix network health issues before users are impacted.
Organizations cannot always manually track and analyze all the outages that occur due to poor internet connectivity and blocked ports. But with the right tools to automate these processes, network admins can identify outages and take measures to resolve them before they impact productivity.
You can run a bandwidth test on your organization’s network device to predict the average bandwidth speed. There are multiple ways in which you can assess your bandwidth usage, including:
- Analyzing traffic at the application level: Scrutinize network traffic for enterprise-specific applications utilized by top talkers.
- Assessing your bandwidth needs: Forecast your bandwidth needs according to the traffic surge that each application or IP address generates.
- Probing for unusual behavior: Look for unusual traffic spikes in your network that might cause security threats and compromise your network data.
- Optimizing your thresholds: Set thresholds for optimal bandwidth usage and rely on alerting features to help you monitor and troubleshoot important issues.
With the right bandwidth usage monitoring tool, you can get an accurate picture on your bandwidth demands and network requirements, and track all bandwidth-hogging applications across the network. You’ll be able to visualize your network, helping you forecast future bandwidth usage, which not only helps you identify and troubleshoot outages, but also find ways to prevent network hassles and lag.
NetFlow Analyzer: The panacea of bandwidth usage monitoring
ManageEngine NetFlow Analyzer is a holistic network bandwidth monitoring solution and traffic analysis tool that displays insights about your network bandwidth usage. This flow-based tool monitors traffic patterns at an interface-specific level, providing details on device performance and bandwidth usage.
Utilizing its capacity planning reports, NetFlow Analyzer enables you to measure bandwidth growth over the timeframe that you specify, so you can make informed decisions about the network. Along with bandwidth consumption, you can detect internal and external security threats, and track all your network anomalies with network behavioral analysis. You can also find traffic details within your network’s IP addresses, ports, protocols, and conversations for easy and secure bandwidth optimization. Try our 30-day, free trial or reach out to our support team experts for more information.
