Network traffic management refers to the process of intercepting and analyzing network traffic, and directing the traffic to optimum resources based on priorities. The key components that have to be monitored for better management of your network include network performance, traffic, and security. Network traffic control tool leverages management techniques like bandwidth and network performance monitoring, monitoring traffic patterns to detect and prevent bottlenecks, network security analysis, and optimization to ensure optimal functioning of the network. It helps maximize performance and security of the network by keeping network congestions and threats at bay.

The benefits of a network traffic management software

• Prevent outages: Gives you visibility into your network performance data in real time, and helps you detect and prevent potential issues and outages.
• Troubleshoot quickly and efficiently: Makes problem-solving easier by identifying bandwidth bottlenecks and other network issues in real time, including irregular change in traffic behavior and configuration changes.
• Manage network changes: Helps you adapt to growth and changes in your network, monitor them to detect abnormal fluctuations or threats, forecast traffic behavior, and plan requirements to ensure your network's requirements are matched.
• Identify security threats: Provides the level of security you need through network behavior analysis to tell a normal traffic spike from a security threat, or something as severe as a zero-day intrusion.

Network traffic management tool

While most real-time network traffic management tools include bandwidth monitoring and optimization features, their solutions are restricted to just that. One of the most important aspects of network traffic management almost always overlooked is network security and behavior analysis. Not having a strong security solution in addition to a network traffic monitor can leave your network vulnerable to attacks. An ideal network traffic management tool should:

• Provide real-time visibility in to the network
• Analyze behavioral patterns and manage traffic proactively
• Quickly and efficiently diagnose and troubleshoot
• Keep your network secure from zero-day attacks, internal threats, and unknown worms

Real-time network traffic management with NetFlow Analyzer

Network traffic control and management is crucial to ensure you get the most out of your network; a complete network traffic management solution like NetFlow Analyzer makes understanding what is going on in your network a lot easier. Besides ensuring applications important to your business are prioritized, thereby preventing non-critical apps from hogging your bandwidth, NetFlow Analyzer offers various other benefits, including safeguarding your network from outages, helping you troubleshoot and fix issues faster, foreseeing and preventing possible bottlenecks, managing your evolving network, identifying security threats more efficiently and, consequently, increasing ROI.

End to end network traffic monitoring

There are a lot of causes for outages or traffic spikes in your network, including human error and security threats. Real-time visibility into your network traffic activity is essential to help you proactively monitor and identify any issues that might affect your network performance. NetFlow Analyzer's network traffic controller gives you a comprehensive overview of your network with over 50 customizable reports and graphs. It displays a clear picture of what’s going on in your network, with various metrics like bandwidth usage per device and application, top users and conversations, latency, and jitter. NetFlow Analyzer also helps you set threshold alerts based on volume, speed, and utilization, and notifies you via email, SMS, SNMP trap, or a help desk ticket ticket.

Many IT admins would like to have a network traffic manager that accurately predicts bottlenecks and other hiccups, and which enables them to fix performance issues before they arise. NetFlow Analyzer employs techniques like autocorrelation, seasonality trend loss decomposition, and regression to forecast bandwidth usage trends. With its capacity planning feature, it also gives you a holistic view of your traffic activity and bandwidth usage trends over any selected period of time, your traffic and application growth, plus helps you make informed decisions on planning your bandwidth requirements, and identifying any anomalous growth in traffic.

Traffic shaping for a better network traffic management system

Controlling network traffic involves limiting bandwidth to a certain apps and users, prioritizing traffic and applications, and ensuring a certain maximum or minimum bandwidth for all users. Traffic shaping is a management technique that essentially limits the bandwidth consumed by non-business critical apps and users. It delays certain flows or packets to ensure optimal perform of high priority tasks and applications.

NetFlow Analyzer uses various traffic shaping techniques like access control list (ACL) and Service Policy to help you reconfigure your quality of service policies. This aids in providing better network performance by limiting or blocking non-critical IPs and apps that hog your bandwidth. NetFlow Analyzer’s Cisco CBQoS gives you visibility into class-based traffic patterns, helping you validate your policies and their performance.

Network security and behavior analysis

Having intrusion detection tools in addition to multiple firewalls for network security is not always an easy or feasible option. NetFlow Analyzer’s Advanced Security Analytics Module is a flow-based security analytics and anomaly detection tool that helps you detect any intrusion or attack that may have surpassed your firewall. It gives you actionable intelligence to detect a wide array of internal and external threats or intrusions like botnets, distributed denial-of-service attacks, zero-day intrusions, and probes that could otherwise affect your network’s overall performance and bring it to a standstill. NetFlow Analyzer monitors each and every flow to secure your network before the threat matures into an attack, and offers all this data in a single view.

NetFlow Analyzer is a robust and scalable platform offering bandwidth monitoring and unified traffic analytics. Download a free trial of our real-time network traffic management software now!

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