Why network administrators need a network bandwidth monitor?
The program should collect the inbound and outbound network traffic data on computers. With such a program you can easily find out which computer in your network uses up the available bandwidth.
What other benefits will we get when we use a bandwidth monitoring program? We can identify a guilty employee, who uses the company recourses for personal affairs, or find computers infected by a virus which generates a lot of network traffic.
When the bandwidth monitor constantly collects the statistics about the inbound and outbound traffic which passes through each networked computer, it can display the dynamic of speed transfer changes in the real-time on graphs and tables. When the program monitors your network traffic usage 24 hours a day, it will be able to detect network failures and network bandwidth problems. The program can notify you in time about the bandwidth problems and network interface errors. After analyzing reports generated by the program, you can localize bottlenecks and fix the issues.
A good network bandwidth monitoring program should support the SNMP protocol for accessing the bandwidth data on managed switches. The SNMP protocol can be used to monitor the network bandwidth on computers as well as on other active network hardware.
The program should offer various options for sending notifications and executing particular actions when a failure occurs or some conditions are satisfied (reaching traffic usage limits, etc.). The program can display a message on the screen, play a sound alarm, or send e-mail and SMS messages. In this case, the administrator will be informed about all the failures in time and promptly fix the problems.
Dmitriy Stepanov, the network bandwidth monitoring program author
Article Source: ArticlesBase.com
