What Is Network Traffic Monitoring? Explore It’s Role in Security

Nothing frustrates community engineers fairly like gradual web velocity at work.
We all know we’re not alone in this wrestle. Elements comparable to inadequate bandwidth, community congestion, and poorly configured units can all contribute to sluggish community efficiency. 

So, how can we guarantee our networks stay sturdy and high-performing? The reply lies in efficient community visitors monitoring.

What is community visitors monitoring?

Network visitors monitoring is the method of analyzing and monitoring the info shifting throughout a community. 

By implementing network monitoring software, companies can acquire real-time insights into their community well being, observe the circulate of information, and establish potential points earlier than they escalate. 

What is community bandwidth?

Network bandwidth is the utmost data transfer fee (bit fee) throughout a network, usually described in megabits per second (Mbps) when deciding on an web bundle. For instance, a 200 megabit obtain velocity interprets to 200 Mbps, whereas sooner suppliers could provide speeds of 1 gigabit (1000 Mb).

Bandwidth from an internet service provider (ISP) is shared amongst customers on a community. If just one consumer is on-line, points are uncommon, however when a number of customers entry the community concurrently, issues can come up.

Bandwidth is usually divided equally, however actions like streaming or gaming eat extra bandwidth than searching. That is the place high quality of service (QoS) settings come in. QoS, often set on the modem, allocates bandwidth primarily based on demand, guaranteeing streaming and gaming customers expertise much less disruption.

To watch bandwidth, units connect with a community both through cable or wirelessly by dynamic host configuration protocol (DHCP). Every system receives a novel IP handle, enabling the modem to route visitors accurately. Network monitoring packages use these IP addresses to establish units and analyze the info being despatched and acquired.

Numerous instruments routinely monitor community visitors, producing experiences and alerts. The first worth of community monitoring software program lies in its skill to research and optimize utilization. These instruments assist create a greater expertise for all community customers. Whereas residence customers primarily monitor private units like laptops and sensible TVs, enterprise customers should handle quite a few community factors, together with native and cloud servers, which are sometimes extra important.

Why is community visitors monitoring vital?

Network visitors monitoring is vital as a result of it helps enhance efficiency and preserve knowledge protected. By watching how knowledge flows, companies can spot gradual areas and ensure vital functions get the bandwidth they want. It additionally helps discover any unauthorized entry or unusual exercise that might sign a community safety subject, permitting for fast motion to repair issues.

As well as, monitoring permits for fast problem-solving. With real-time knowledge, community managers can catch points early, which reduces downtime and retains issues operating easily. This follow additionally helps meet trade guidelines by offering experiences on community exercise, guaranteeing that providers are quick and dependable for customers.

Advantages of community visitors monitoring

By holding a detailed eye on knowledge circulate and consumer exercise, organizations can reap a number of advantages that improve each effectivity and network security. Listed below are 5 key benefits of implementing community visitors monitoring:

• Efficiency optimization: By analyzing visitors patterns, community monitoring helps establish bandwidth bottlenecks, permitting for changes that improve total community efficiency.
• Security enhancement: Steady monitoring detects uncommon exercise or potential safety threats, enabling immediate responses to mitigate dangers and shield delicate knowledge.
• Resource allocation: Traffic monitoring offers insights into how bandwidth is utilized, permitting organizations to allocate sources extra successfully primarily based on consumer demand and utility wants.
• Troubleshooting help: Monitoring instruments simplify the identification of points by offering real-time knowledge on community efficiency, making it simpler to troubleshoot and resolve connectivity issues.
• Compliance and reporting: Many industries require adherence to regulatory requirements. Network monitoring instruments assist guarantee compliance by sustaining logs and producing experiences that doc community exercise and efficiency.

The right way to monitor community visitors

Gaining a transparent understanding of how one can successfully monitor your community visitors in keeping with your distinctive wants and scale empowers you to take proactive measures that guarantee your community operates seamlessly. Listed below are the steps:

• Assess your monitoring wants: How closely you monitor your community visitors relies upon primarily in your wants. Residence customers and small companies usually don’t want to observe their community visitors a lot until they’re searching for potential unauthorized customers.
• Test your modem’s admin web page: Even then, your modem’s admin web page ought to have a listing of linked units that you could handle.
• Use community monitoring instruments: Network monitoring instruments might be helpful for locating out what takes up nearly all of your bandwidth and doubtlessly provide help to enhance how your bandwidth will get distributed. For instance, in case you discover that your sensible TV wants extra bandwidth than the remainder of your units, you’ll be able to comply with up that community evaluation in your modem and set precedence to your sensible TV by utilizing that router QoS setting we talked about earlier.

• Perceive the impression for enterprise-level corporations: On the midsize and enterprise ranges, companies can have a whole bunch and even hundreds of units joined on the identical company community. At that degree of visitors, it’s simply too tough to observe that many units with out assist, and thankfully, that’s the place community monitoring instruments shine.
• Use bandwidth monitoring options: With bandwidth monitoring, automated alerting, and report technology, community admins can simply monitor all of the visitors on an organization’s intranet.
• Use alerting options: Alerting options are significantly invaluable for enterprise community monitoring software program. Giant corporations usually have native network-connected infrastructure, comparable to knowledge servers, that want to remain at optimum performance for day-to-day operations.
• Monitor efficiency thresholds: Network admins use alerting options to make sure that network-connected infrastructure elements don’t drop under baseline efficiency thresholds and that they are often introduced again on-line shortly in the event that they do.
• Regulate total community well being: This will also be carried out to observe total community well being as a result of if the community as a complete is struggling, then productiveness may also undergo.
• Think about your scale: When contemplating community visitors monitoring instruments, preserve your wants in thoughts. Whereas these instruments are doubtlessly overkill at a small scale, they’ll present main productiveness and uptime advantages on the midsize and enterprise ranges.

Finest community visitors monitoring instruments

Utilizing superior community monitoring software program outfitted with cutting-edge options is important for successfully managing and analyzing your community knowledge.

The appropriate selection will rely in your particular necessities and the targets you purpose to attain together with your community insights.

To qualify for inclusion in the community monitoring class, a product should:

• Continually monitor the efficiency of a whole laptop community
• Create a baseline for community efficiency metrics
• Alert directors if the community crashes or varies from the baseline
• Recommend options to efficiency points after they come up
• Present visualizations for community efficiency knowledge

*Under are the highest 5 main community monitoring software program options from G2’s Fall 2024 Grid® Report. Some critiques could also be edited for readability.

1. NinjaOne

NinjaOne is a cloud-based IT administration software program designed for IT professionals to streamline operations by real-time monitoring of community units and endpoints. It enhances community monitoring by guaranteeing optimum efficiency and fast subject decision, with options comparable to distant monitoring and administration for monitoring system well being, and automatic alerts that notify customers of outages or efficiency drops.

What customers like greatest:

“NinjaOne helps our IT department automate many tasks. Its integrated ecosystem, which includes a ticketing system and remote control, allows us to deliver excellent support. We especially value its automation features, patch management, and responsive customer support, all of which have made our experience with NinjaOne successful. The application is very user-friendly, and the setup and integration were straightforward. We completed the startup and went live in no time. Great job!”

– NinjaOne Review, Giuseppe L.

What customers dislike:

“I would like to see a dark mode option for the user interface, as well as the ability to exclude offline devices from the dashboard statistics, as they currently appear as unhealthy. Additionally, it would be helpful to have the option to run patches and scripts on a scheduled basis if they are missed.”

– NinjaOne Review, Drew B.

2. Dynatrace

Dynatrace is a complete observability platform that gives superior monitoring for functions, infrastructure, and networks. It helps community monitoring by providing deep insights into community efficiency and dependencies, serving to groups troubleshoot successfully. Key options embody AI-powered monitoring that detects anomalies and offers root trigger evaluation, and full-stack observability that displays all the things from utility efficiency to community visitors.

What customers like greatest:

“What I appreciate most about Dynatrace is its ability to provide a clear, end-to-end view of our entire application environment. It feels like having an additional team member constantly monitoring every aspect of our systems, from infrastructure to user experience. The AI-driven problem detection and root-cause analysis are particularly impressive, enabling us to resolve issues before they escalate. The automation features also save us valuable time, allowing our team to focus on more strategic projects instead of constantly putting out fires.”

– Dynatrace Review, Sushanth N.

What customers dislike:

“The only downside to Dynatrace is that its pricing can be quite high, especially for smaller teams or businesses that are just starting out. Additionally, while the platform offers a wide range of features, it may take some time to fully utilize all its capabilities. A more user-friendly onboarding experience would greatly enhance its accessibility.”

– Dynatrace Review, Karan S.

3. Atera

Atera is an all-in-one distant monitoring and administration (RMM) resolution tailor-made for IT service suppliers. It helps community monitoring by enabling steady monitoring of community units and efficiency metrics, guaranteeing techniques run easily for purchasers. Two notable options are its built-in assist desk, which provides built-in ticketing and consumer administration for streamlined assist, and real-time monitoring that gives alerts for potential points.

What customers like greatest:

“We’ve been using Atera since we implemented it about five years ago. What initially attracted us was its cost structure; it was refreshing to see that they charge per agent rather than per device. As a company with many endpoints but only a few technicians, this approach has been a significant advantage for us. As our team has expanded, our costs have naturally increased, but Atera’s features have also improved, which has made it a valuable investment.”

– Atera Review, Blaise V.

What customers dislike:

“The new GUI isn’t as clean as the previous version. When entering time, I find it tedious to click the dropdown button for each entry, especially when handling multiple tickets throughout the day. Additionally, the Atera Agent occasionally fails on devices, requiring a script for cleanup and reinstallation. Lastly, Atera really needs a dark mode option!”

– Atera Review, Craig P

4. LogicMonitor

LogicMonitor is a cloud-based monitoring platform designed to offer insights throughout IT infrastructures. It enhances community monitoring by automating efficiency monitoring to make sure dependable connectivity and efficiency. Key options embody auto-discovery, which routinely detects units and providers in the community, and customized dashboards that permit customers to visualise important community metrics in actual time.

What customers like greatest:

“The software is excellent and has been a valuable asset to our company, providing us with complete visibility into our environment. Before implementing LogicMonitor, we only had insight into a small fraction of our servers and network devices. Beyond the software itself, the employees and support services are fantastic. Everyone we’ve interacted with—from sales to account management to the engineering team—has provided exceptional customer service. Their dedication to our success is evident and greatly appreciated.”

– LogicMonitor Review, Jeff P.

What customers dislike:

“I’ve noticed that the monitors in LogicMonitor are primarily number-based, which makes it challenging to pull and display strings within the platform. This limitation made implementation a bit difficult. It would be helpful to have the ability to pull strings as variables. Additionally, there’s a relatively steep learning curve to fully utilize all the features. While SNMP monitoring works well, it would be great to have proper reporting for Aruba Central, although that might be more of a limitation of Aruba’s API than LogicMonitor’s capabilities.”

–LogicMonitor Review, Nicholas H.

5. Entuity

Entuity is a community administration resolution that gives complete monitoring and analytics for community units. It helps community monitoring by delivering detailed insights into efficiency, serving to IT groups proactively establish and resolve points. Notable options embody centralized change administration for automated configuration backups and monitoring, and intuitive reporting that gives customizable experiences and visualizations of community well being and efficiency traits.

What customers like greatest:

” Entuity has been an excellent product for managing both SNMP and configuration management. What truly stands out to me is the support provided by Entuity. They have the best support team I’ve ever encountered, regardless of the product. Their responsiveness and expertise have made a significant difference in our experience.”

– Entuity Review, Randy S.

What customers dislike:

“The configuration process for implementing OKTA 2FA was challenging, particularly because the example configuration contained errors. Since the configuration is case-sensitive, the requirement for “administrator” to be in lowercase was a point of confusion, as the example incorrectly listed it in uppercase. This discrepancy caused me several hours of frustration before I could get it working properly.”

 – Entuity Review, Jonathan Ok.

Regulate the street forward!

Network monitoring is important for sustaining the well being and efficiency of IT infrastructures. By repeatedly monitoring community exercise, organizations can shortly establish and resolve points, optimize efficiency, and guarantee safety. 

In a quickly evolving technological panorama, efficient community monitoring is essential for supporting enterprise operations and reaching strategic targets. 

Seeking to monitor particular person functions fairly than all the community? Explore application performance monitoring (APM) tools.

This text was initially revealed in 2019. It has been up to date with new info.