Network bandwidth monitoring

Network bandwidth monitoring allows the monitored organization to benefit from best network grooming practices. Network grooming is the act of auditing and monitoring all network-connected devices, such as switches and routers, to ensure that these devices are consuming bandwidth within expected tolerances.

Network grooming also provides the opportunity to ensure that all purchased bandwidth is available to the network and not being wasted by oversights like not adjusting circuit software settings after a circuit hardware upgrade, and the general verification of overall network performance.

When a network manager has professional bandwidth usage reports available, he or she is also able to utilize bandwidth “avoidance” or bandwidth “shifting” techniques to smooth out bandwidth demand and consumption.

This process involves analyzing network traffic to identify peak bandwidth usage, wasteful bandwidth usage, and other bandwidth inefficiencies. Once these usage patterns are determined, the network manager can work to shift some of the bandwidth usages to off-peak times. This results in smoother network performance and less bandwidth peeks. In the best cases, it can also put off the purchase of additional bandwidth until some time in the future.

Stand-alone bandwidth monitoring software is available, but all of the bandwidth monitoring capabilities that you could ever require are also found in the better network monitoring software packages.