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Healthy Networks and Monitoring Tools
Maintaining healthy networks is becoming an increasingly difficult challenge, and doing this on an ever shrinking IT budget is even harder. This is why as network administrators, the purchase of some well supported tools that will assist you in keeping your network going is the smart thing to do. Choosing the right tools for the right job, is not always that simple but there is always room for general purpose network monitoring tools in any administrators toolbox.
NetFlowTools or Network Monitor?
Every administrator agrees that maintaining a healthy network free of intruders, viruses and internal bandwidth hogs is becoming increasing difficult as today’s technologies and social media keep evolving. We all work in a very different way that we did ten years ago each of us hogging away at more network resources than we sometimes need to do our core jobs. The distractions creating memory hogs are all over the Internet and with today’s social media and immediacy in everything we do, they are hard to resist. This is why network administrators need to be more proactive about creating an effective network usage policy for their company and then making sure that, within their specific limits of margin of error, these policies are adhered to. To do that they will surely need a few tools to streamline the network management and monitoring process. This is why I think that the answer to this question is that you very probably could put both of these tools to good use on your network.
The need to Monitor Network Traffic
Administrators need to build security into their networks. But as we all know, no sooner has one security hole been patched a new vulnerability is often revealed. So in addition to taking the entire list of security precautions that include but are not limited to creating a tiered system of passwords for sensitive data, implementing a strong firewall, using top quality anti-virus software on all systems, building awareness among all employees about the dangers of security breaches on the network, you do need to monitor your network traffic on a daily basis to ensure that your network is running in a healthy fashion as well as to be able to have early detection of potential flaws in your security implementation. Network Monitor is a very useful tool when you need to zero in on a problem with a great level of detail .... how more detailed can you get than the actual packet content that is traversing the network. However, it is not practical to monitor all traffic to this level of detail and this is where a tool with a broader use and smaller footprint is needed.
Continuous Analysis through NetFlow Data
This is where the Cisco NetFlow protocol comes into play. NetFlow packets do not contain the traffic payload, providing you with much needed traffic information without loading your network with unnecessary traffic. The exporting of NetFlow packets thus puts little or no additional load on the router that is exporting.
Distinct NetFlowTools makes the continuous analysis of your network traffic on a daily basis to look for trends and unusual behavior easy, possible and affordable. Through the NetFlowTools Analyzer, it provides a good level of detail as to the origin and type of traffic and includes features such as the ability to send an alarm when certain predefined bandwidth usage thresholds are reached.
Request a trial copy of NetFlowTools today by clicking on one of the links below:
That said, there are times when you need to have a deeper analysis of what is going on on the network. There is only one way to do that with accuracy, and that requires a probe that intercepts the data (please use this only where and in a way that it is legal to do so), and provides more detailed traffic statistics as well as the possibility of actually examining the specific traffic, if it is causing major issues compromising the stability of the network. Most switches and Firewalls today have what is known as a mirror or SPAN port that can be configured to receive a copy of all traffic that is traversing the unit. It's purpose is to allow products like Distinct's Network Monitor to help you analyze your Network traffic. Network Monitor allows you to capture all of the traffic through packet sniffing and so that you can analyze the actual IP packets, or gather important network statistics from it provide you with more detailed network traffic statistics than is possible with the NetFlow protocol. This is where the Statistics Usage Reports in Distinct Network Monitor come into the picture.
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