Modern networks are far more complicated than before. With this complexity comes many opportunities for things to go wrong.
Additionally, networks are often the backbone of businesses, and so when they don’t perform to the best of their capabilities, a business may suffer. As a network administrator, this is certainly something one should avoid.
One of the best ways to avoid business-impacting issues is to see them coming and fix them before they have a chance to have a devastating impact on the business.
Why stability of network performance is important?
Most organizations rely on the internet to conduct business-critical operations, internet speed can make all the difference in their success. Bandwidth monitoring is a way for IT administrators to determine actual bandwidth availability on the systems. It helps you understand usage, traffic flow, bandwidth hogs, and network strains across your IT environment. Beyond best practices network monitoring, bandwidth monitoring gives you the means to identify hosts, talkers, and listeners, as well as get a sense of how much bandwidth and what type/protocols are being consumed.
In a work environment, people use their computers for a lot of things other than work. When you’re able to keep an eye on anything that could affect your bandwidth, from internet browsing to downloading, uploading, and streaming, you can better ensure network availability.
Not only does having an entire office streaming media influence your bandwidth, but employees also watching movies or TV can really kill productivity.
blësk Network Traffic Analyzer (NTA) tool
The Network Traffic Analyzer (NTA) module of the blësk network monitoring tool, captures the continuous flow of network traffic and presents the data in graphs and tables.
These can provide valuable information on how your network is being used overall and at the individual level as well. It is a simple, portable traffic measurement and monitoring tool, which supports various management activities, including network optimization & planning, and detection of network security violations.
blësk NTA helps the network administrators keep a close eye on network perimeter. Even with strong firewalls in place, mistakes can happen, and unwanted traffic could get through. Users could also leverage methods such as tunneling, external anonymizers, and VPNs to get around firewall rules.
NTA provides the ability to identify those situations where network traffic does not comply with specified policies, or when it exceeds defined thresholds. This will help you in detecting network configuration problems including:
- Misconfiguration of software applications (by analyzing protocol traffic data)
- Identification of hosts that use unnecessary protocols.
- Excessive network bandwidth utilization
blësk NTA discovers the application protocols (Facebook, YouTube, BitTorrent, etc.) using the nDPI approach, a deep packet inspection technology. It characterizes HTTP traffic by relying, among other things, on the characterization services provided by search engines.
It provides detailed information about network traffic, including traffic volume, key speakers, bandwidth consumption, and high usage times.
blësk, a complete network monitoring solution
blësk NTA is compatible with all data capture approaches necessary for the functionality of this type of software. It can use flow data statistics generated by routers, switches, specialized standalone hardware probes, or mirror port configuration on switches.
Briefly blësk NTA is an essential way to monitor network availability and activity to identify anomalies, maximize performance, and keep an eye out for attacks.
We understand that some organizations may not have the inhouse capacity to facilitate many essential tasks; therefore, blësk offers managed services to the low resourced companies to monitor their network services.
Download a free trial of blësk on https://www.blesk.ca/essai-gratuit/