Emails are an important aspect in every organization’s business needs. Email fetching issues or delay in mail delivery triggers many questions and raising of incident tickets by almost every employee ranging from the managers to CTO’s. Ensuring the up-time of the servers running business critical applications and links that connect to these servers are a big priority for a Network Administrator.
As a Network Administrator, you would definitely look forward to monitoring your organization’s email server to know if there is any unwanted traffic originating from it or to it, if the link connected to the server has the right capacity to carry the traffic, if the provided bandwidth is being choked and which hosts are the main contributors of the traffic.
But which is the cost effective solution? That is the “million-dollar”(pun intended!) question. The answer lies in NetFlow Analyzer and its IP Group feature. NetFlow Analyzer, an all software bandwidth monitoring solution, can monitor your network bandwidth and report on traffic usage across the links. By using the IP Group feature, you can monitor specific server or even a numbers of servers and get network reports on the traffic utilization, applications contributing to the traffic, hosts involved with the traffic and etc. This helps to find if only those applications that are actually supposed to contribute traffic to server are doing so, if any unwanted applications are running on the server, which specific host is sending high volumes of traffic, if the bandwidth provided is indeed right or if there is any bandwidth choke and at what time it happens.
You can create the IP Group by including the IP Address of your mail server and associate it with the interface that carries traffic to the mail server. You can also set the IP Group speed based on the speed of the interface carrying traffic to the server or based on the maximum speed to be taken by the traffic to the server. This speed is used for calculating the utilization percentage of traffic to the server.
Creating the IP Group
The IP Group created will show the traffic based on volume, speed, utilization and packets. You can thus find if the link has the right speed to handle all the traffic to the server or if the provided speed is much higher than needed (This might not be an issue when considering the LAN traffic).
The application tab shows you what applications contributed to the traffic to or from the server. You can see if the majority of traffic that came to or went out of the server is indeed SMTP or if there are applications like maybe FTP which should never have happened or an unexpected large volume of HTTP traffic. The advantages does not stop there. You can even drill down on an application to find what hosts were using these applications and volume of traffic they contributed.
Unwanted traffic to the mail server
Who was FTPing to the mail server
Thanks and Regards,
Don Thomas Jacob
