Network Traffic Monitoring
Information is worth more than gold. This is a phrase used for many years, even before the internet. But, with the growth of the World Wide Web and the transformation that it caused on the world, this makes even more sense.
Today, you can purchase a plethora of extremely important data for your business. The difficulty is to treat them and analyze them in order to create value for your business. That being said, the analysis of information regarding network traffic is of utmost importance to reduce costs, find out bottlenecks and optimize the data traffic of the organizations. Thus, network traffic monitoring is a key activity for any company. In this article we will point out the main mistakes made in the monitoring of network traffic and the possible solutions that you can adopt to get around them. Check it out!
1. Failing to set goals of traffic monitoring
When monitoring the traffic in your organization, you can find a lot of information, called metadata. The high volume of data can confuse the team and make the professional responsible for monitoring unaware of important insights for the troubleshooting and the identification of bottlenecks.
Therefore, list the main limitations and needs of your network before you start monitoring. This way, it will be easier to identify valuable information when it arises.
2. Adopting different reactions to the same problems
Traffic monitoring is able to identify different problems and situations in your organization’s network. From a virus that has infected the network through an e-mail up to specific downloads that shouldn’t have been made (as via torrent, for example), you can see the source of the problem in realtime.
Many companies waste time to adopt different solutions for the same situation. Therefore, create protocols for common problems, in order to speed time to resolution and educate other employees about the harms of certain practices, which brings us to the next mistake.
3. Failing to use the information to raise awareness
Explain the reasons for certain actions is typically cheaper than employing prohibitive measures. After all, awareness is the best way to have your employees understand the decisions taken by the Board.
So, explain why certain downloads and websites undermine the entire network. Base you explanation on data from the monitoring and adopt a less technical language and user-focused. You may be surprised by the change of behavior of the employees. Although the simple blocking can be effective for certain sectors, it can undermine the creativity of areas that need to seek sources of information in different places. In addition, there are several ways to escape blockings and if your employee doesn’t want to work, do not count on the blocking to make him become productive.
4. Failing to choose the correct technology to your reality
Several factors influence the company’s network monitoring ability. The turnover of staff in the IT teams and the change of routines, quantity of probes (which is often a factor of price change), which information the network administrators want to view and specific needs must be detailed and considered in the hiring of a solution.
Therefore, it is important that the software used is easy to understand, so that new employees can use the maximum of its capacity. This way, the company does not waste time or money with turnover.
Get to know OpMon Traffic Analyzer, developed by us! Click here to see how our solution for monitoring network traffic works and understand how it will help you to solve many problems of your organization.
Monitoring the network via sFlow and NetFlow
To monitor the information trafficked in the network, we provide OpMon Traffic Analyzer, to our customers, a solution that uses protocols NetFlow and sFlow to see what goes on in their corporate network. To learn more about the product click here.
Among the main features of a tool for monitoring network traffic are:
1. Understand the traffic behavior of your organization;
2. Identify the source of the problems generated by traffic anomalies;
3. Validate the impact of planned changes in the network;
4. Find out the root cause of network congestion;
5. Measure the consumption of each application or user links.
Network monitoring is one of your company’s IT priorities?
IT professionals know that even state-of-the-art equipment and the most up to date software do not guarantee systems immune to errors. Therefore, any system critical to a business should be monitored constantly to prevent outages that affect its use by users. Read our post on the importance of network monitoring
