Bandwidth Usage Monitoring

Bandwidth usage monitoring involves measuring bandwidth speed and capacity as well as network traffic between devices and applications. It's important to understand how bandwidth is utilized on your network, and monitoring bandwidth usage is now one of the most critical functions for any network admin.

Bandwidth refers to a network's capacity to transfer data over the internet or between devices and is measured in bits per second (bps or bit/sec). As such, bandwidth capacity—the maximum data rate a link can transfer at—becomes an important factor to consider since your infrastructure needs to support all your bandwidth usage.

To gain insight into current and future bandwidth consumption, bandwidth monitoring will help you understand usage, traffic flow, and network strains. You'll also be able to prevent bandwidth hogs from exceeding utilization thresholds, potentially causing slowdowns and outages.

A bandwidth usage monitoring tool captures inputs from network traffic streams and converts the data into easy-to-use visualizations. This tool should also include a dashboard for presenting a comprehensive overview with insight into relevant “top ten” views.

With these continuous insights, you can understand how the network is used and visualize the traffic patterns. You can also see which users, applications, and protocols are consuming the largest amounts of bandwidth and look at the IP addresses of any top talkers on the network.

Typically, a monitoring tool will include alerts to warn you when a particular interface exceeds a set threshold so you can head off any problems. It may also include timeline tools for cross-stack data correlation, as well as reports to capture analysis for additional insights.

And a bandwidth usage monitoring tool can make it easier to pinpoint when bandwidth utilization is too high, so you can troubleshoot before significant problems arise.

Use SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer (NTA) to automatically collect flow data from any sFlow-enabled device monitored by SolarWinds network monitoring software to identify which users, applications, and protocols are consuming the most bandwidth. You'll be able to monitor traffic arriving from designated ports, source and destination IPs, and protocols to spot potential problems quickly. You'll also be able to identify network-wide top talkers and applications to prevent utilization thresholds from being reached.

NTA will let you create an Orion alert on bandwidth utilization for a specific interface, so you can easily see the alert has been triggered based on your threshold setting. By default, the threshold setting is at 75%.

To find the cause of high bandwidth utilization in NTA:

1. Click My Dashboards > NetFlow > NTA Summary.
2. Under NetFlow Sources, locate and expand the relevant node.
3. Click the interface for which you received the bandwidth utilization alert.
4. View the Top XX Endpoints for the interface. Each endpoint in the list has a utilization percentage associated with it.
5. View the Top XX Conversations to correlate the relevant items from the Top XX Endpoints list.

Automated alerts are built to notify you of potential issues before they turn into serious complications. Alerts in SolarWinds^® NetFlow Traffic Analyzer (NTA) are customizable and triggered by conditions you set up when configuring the alerts. You can schedule alerts to monitor your network during specific time periods, and the types of events for which you can create alerts vary, depending on the Orion^® Platform products you have installed.

To find out-of-the-box NTA-specific predefined alerts:

1. Click Alerts & Activity > Alerts, and click Manage Alerts in the upper right.
2. In the Alert Manager, filter the alerts to display NTA-only items. Type NetFlow or CBQoS into the search box.
3. Make sure the alerts are on.

You'll be able to configure the following alerts:

• Flow alerts: These alerts are created on recently processed flows to identify and solve quality issues quickly.
• Top talker alerts: By default, top talker alerts will notify you when traffic received and transmitted by the interface has exceeded the defined bandwidth usage threshold as well as when utilization drops back below the threshold. It'll also collect information about the current top talker.
• CBQoS alerts: CBQoS alerts confirm the CBQoS policies applied to traffic flowing through your devices are producing the intended results. You can set up alert thresholds to be notified about traffic processing issues. Note you'll need to specify the policy and class path to activate the trigger definition.

Designed to proactively reduce network downtime, SolarWinds NTA delivers actionable insights to help optimize and troubleshoot bandwidth usage. IT pros will better understand how and where bandwidth is consumed.

With NTA bandwidth utilization monitoring, you'll receive instant alert notifications when top talkers are consuming over the bandwidth utilization threshold. You'll also see which applications consume the most network bandwidth, with insight into traffic sources like ports, source IPs, destination IPs, and protocols. Analyze network traffic with custom overlapping IP address groups and create your own IP address groups to view network traffic how you want to see it. With a central traffic analysis dashboard, you'll be able to see and address the root of bandwidth issues quickly and easily.

NTA collects and analyzes flow data from multiple vendors, including NetFlow v5 and v9, Juniper J-Flow, sFlow, Huawei NetStream, and IPFIX. It also allows for the optimization of CBQoS policies by showing pre- and post-policy CBQoS class maps. Additionally, NTA helps identify malicious or malformed traffic with port 0 monitoring and includes WLC network traffic analysis for monitoring bandwidth use in your wireless environments.