Bandwidth Monitoring Using PRTG Network Monitor
Wondering why your network, application, or website is slow? There are many potential culprits:
- Is the router responsible?
- Is the server blocking on IO due to an overloaded hard disk?
- Are the leased lines the culprit? Do we just need more bandwidth?
- Are we losing bandwidth to file-sharing applications, video streaming, and other things we don't expect to be running on our corporate network?
Bandwidth monitoring software helps pinpoint your actual problem so that you can stop guessing and start resolving it.
Bandwidth monitoring basically entails tracking the bandwidth usage of leased lines, network connections, network devices (routers, switches, etc.) and the like. This way, bandwidth monitoring software such as PRTG Network Monitor helps you to
- measure the actual amount of bandwidth being used (e.g. for billing purposes)
- proactively trace usage trends, bottlenecks, and connectivity errors
- make informed decisions on how to balance and route network traffic and decide what purchases are necessary to improve the flow of data within the network.
Furthermore, a bandwidth monitoring software can also be used to alert administrators whether there are network load issues or breached bandwidth thresholds, etc.
Benefits of a Bandwidth Monitoring Software
Understanding bandwidth and resource consumption is the key to better network management:
- Avoid bandwidth and server performance bottlenecks
- Find out what applications or what servers are using up your bandwidth
- Deliver better quality of service to your users by being proactive
- Reduce costs by buying bandwidth and hardware according to actual load
For a quick and accurate analysis you need a bandwidth meter and router monitor such as PRTG Network Monitor.
PRTG Network Monitor monitors bandwidth and the traffic in your network and provides you with detailed results - tables and graphs - and allows administrators to discern actual bandwidth usage issues based on multiple parameters, such as IP addresses, port numbers, protocols, etc., using either SNMP, packet sniffing or NetFlow monitoring.
Bandwidth Monitoring Using Packet Sniffing And NetFlow Sensors
Bandwidth monitoring on the basis of packet sniffer sensors generally use the host machine's network card, but can be configured to use monitoring ports found on some networking devices using port mirroring / forwarding in order to monitor the overall network bandwidth utilization. Bandwidth monitoring software that uses NetFlow receives preaggregated data forwarded by NetFlow-capable Cisco devices. PRTG supports packet sniffing as well as NetFlow for bandwidth monitoring.
Free Bandwidth Monitoring Software
You can test our network diagnostic tools with the 30-Day-Trial-Edition. The Freeware Edition is completely free for personal and commercial use, and may be downloaded at no cost. The Commercial Editions are required if you want to monitor more than 10 sensors. Licenses for our bandwidth monitoring software PRTG Network Monitor start at $400 / €300.
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10 Sensors - Full Functionality
