The challenge to providing sufficient bandwidth will remain an ongoing task for enterprises and service providers. IT Managers and ISP helpdesks are too familiar with the complaint that the Internet is “too slow”, but simply increasing your bandwidth and cost associated with it isn’t always the right answer to the bandwidth conundrum. A bandwidth monitor will give you the insight to how your users and customers utilise resources and enable you to put measures in place that will optimise bandwidth usage and pinpoint problem areas.

This blog discusses the benefits a bandwidth monitor offers IT and how it will ultimately decrease your bandwidth spend whilst keeping your users, customers and the business happy.

What does a bandwidth monitor allow you to see?

A Bandwidth monitor provides detailed insight to the type of traffic flowing through the network and identifies various potential causes of bottlenecks such as:

• Hardware: Utilising a bandwidth monitor will enable IT to identify hardware-related causes to bandwidth problems on the network. It is often the assumption that bandwidth issues are caused by misuse, but users aren’t always to blame for frustratingly slow speed issues. Monitoring and analysing how traffic flows through your networking devices will help you identify bottlenecks on devices and take any corrective actions if the need exists.

• Network segments: You may have a certain department within your organisation that simply requires more bandwidth to perform their job function. Today, many applications are web based and require sufficient bandwidth to ensure adequate processing and refresh times. Your bandwidth monitor will detect these kinds of bottlenecks that you will need to eliminate quickly to ensure that business function resumes optimally.

• Applications: Apart from the people relying sufficient bandwidth for adequate application utilisation, the application itself may be the cause of things not moving along swiftly. A bandwidth monitor should pinpoint the type of traffic, its port and IP address to reveal the cause of applications causing bandwidth issues in the environment. Always ensure that you understand the bandwidth requirements your applications have; this includes the regular updates it may need along with the backups of databases.

A bandwidth monitor keeps your finger on the pulse of your environment 

Effective IT management means you have your finger on the pulse of your network and a bandwidth monitor does just that. It is important to know how, why and where traffic flow happens in order to address network issues and perform capacity improvement undertakings. A bandwidth monitor makes the task of viewing network metrics simple in environments where countless variables may cause you to look for the root causes in all the wrong places.

Image credit: Hubspot

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