Bandwidth Monitoring tools help the network administrators to monitor and manage the network more effectively.
What is Bandwidth Monitoring?
Bandwidth monitoring is a fundamental IT activity that keeps track of network devices and connections while detecting flaws, functionality, and network flow. It comprises detecting major connectivity problems and abnormal activities and regulating the quality of different networking components. And it can be done using network monitoring tools.
These monitoring tools keep track of your internet connection and provide you with a full and detailed analysis of what’s going on in your network.
What factors should you consider when choosing Bandwidth Monitors?
- Ease of deployment and real-time visibility.
- A setup that can interact with all models of networking equipment.
- Option to compare current statistics with historical data.
- VLAN (Virtual Local Area Network) tracking and design tools for packet prioritization and congestion control.
- Ability to select the interactions you want to track and analyze.
- Custom scripts should be included as plugins or global function calls.
- Affordable price and free trial demo.
Keeping these criteria in mind, We have summed up a list of best real-time Bandwidth monitors for Network Traffic usage. Let’s get rolling!
SolarWinds NTA
SolarWinds is a well-known name among IT experts. They make various software products, such as network monitoring, visualization, and network reporting software.
SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer (NTA) is an excellent bandwidth monitoring tool. This tool converts bandwidth usage statistics into graphs, and charts, making it easier to see both current & saved historical data and gain a better knowledge of your network activity. Network administrators can operate the network infrastructure more easily by discovering, troubleshooting, and fixing network performance problems.
By optimizing your ability to dig further into network infrastructure, you may evaluate and compare traffic conditions with historical data with more visibility. It is designed to assist you in identifying the source of issues that occurred in the past. Users can also generate reports to better understand bandwidth usage statistics.
SolarWinds NTA is designed to gather, analyze, and display Class-Based Quality of Service (CBQoS) data in addition to using flow data. CBQoS monitoring allows you to check that your rules are functional in prioritizing mission-critical traffic in the event of overload and optimizing bandwidth usage on your network infrastructure.
Features:
- Set a schedule with ease and receive detailed network traffic monitoring and bandwidth statistics
- Simple visualization can aid in the understanding of traffic flow over time and activities.
- Time-series graphs and Quality of Service (QoS) management.
- Threshold-based notifications are adaptable to both big and small enterprise networks.
SolarWinds provides a 30-day free trial period of its Network Bandwidth Analyzer bundle.
ManageEngine
ManageEngine offers a fantastic and simple Bandwidth Monitor tool that you can use to monitor network activity and bandwidth consumption inside your infrastructure.
The free edition of this application allows the user to monitor only two interfaces from a device, which is quite constrained. Still, it provides you with the details and all the statistics you need from your network connections.
It allows you to monitor network connectivity, bandwidth, and relevant data for a variety of devices, such as routers and switches.
Features:
- To properly evaluate network bandwidth, users can specify pre-defined control limits depending on use, period, and frequency.
- Automatically finds the source of network connection problems and troubleshoot it.
- Based on resource management forecasting, it automatically evaluates network infrastructure requirements.
- Analyzes essential VoIP and multimedia performance parameters to achieve best-in-class service standards.
With configurable visualization and reporting options, it’s simple to examine traffic patterns and peak activity hours.
PAESSLER PRTG
PAESSLER PRTG Bandwidth Monitor is a fantastic tool for both individual and commercial use. It checks your Internet protocol address and finds all linked devices.
PRTG scans your whole traffic patterns and offers extensive statistics on which applications and services consume your bandwidth and where possible environmental blockages may exist. It examines and displays a range of bandwidth factors to provide you with a comprehensive picture of your network infrastructure performance.
A Custom alert system sends you SMS, email, or notifications when there is network connectivity and bandwidth issue. This assures that the user can respond quickly to any bandwidth challenges and diagnose problems before escalating.
Individual customers can utilize the speed test mechanism to evaluate if their Broadband connection is performing well and check DSL (Digital subscriber line) bandwidth and other features.
Features:
- Monitors the whole of your network infrastructure’s connections, services, and traffic in real-time.
- It has an auto-discovery feature that allows you to construct and manage a network registry.
- Supports various functionalities such as SNMP, Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI), and Packet Sniffing.
- A built-in protocol analyzer can detect applications and services with a lot of traffic.
- It consists of additional sensors to keep track of workstations and apps.
It also offers a 30-day free trial period available to download. And after the trial period expires, it reverts to a reduced version.
Auvik
Auvik is a cloud-based bandwidth monitoring application that is significantly adaptable and gives you rapid knowledge of the network interfaces you manage through auto-discovery, monitoring, and reporting system.
The statistics and data metrics are updated on a regular basis and can detect networking devices that are exceeding their maximum capacity. In these cases, the system sends out alarms, allowing technicians to intervene and prevent troubles.
Features:
- Performance tracking and an advanced traffic analysis system are included.
- Provides automated network discovery services.
- Data is collected and analyzed in real-time.
- It also has an auto-discovery feature that allows you to construct and manage a network registry.
Essentials and Performance are indeed the two plan editions available in Auvik. The network traffic analysis is part of the performance edition. The performance edition includes all of the features of the Essentials package. Auvik offers a 14-day free trial.
Zabbix
Zabbix is a free and open-source bandwidth monitoring application. Zabbix is well recognized for being simple to set up and having a robust graphical user interface. And it also has a very large active community. Zabbix is scalable, with cross-site visualization capability.
If your bandwidth is limited, just configure an alarm to go off when you reach a specified level. Presently, Zabbix is only available for Linux platforms and its distributions like CentOS, Oracle Linux, Ubuntu, Debian, and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server.
Features:
- Tracks the progress of your network load and bandwidth utilization.
- Whole network traffic between Zabbix and the networking equipment will be encrypted.
- Forecast the network outages and bandwidth demand trends.
- API is available for configuration management and continuous integration.
- Creates complicated logical expressions for specific network device information that is being monitored.
- Using the event correlation mechanism, you can reduce alert noise.
Nagios
Nagios is yet another fantastic real-time bandwidth monitoring application. Network equipment like routers and switches, webpages, and virtual servers are monitored, visualized, and graphed with Nagios. This free network monitoring application gives you a detailed picture of your network infrastructure and how well it’s doing.
Nagios employs the SNMP protocol to receive bandwidth statistics rather than the NetFlow protocol. It can also build a real-time presentation of the traffic levels on each connection.
Features:
- Connection delays and protocol issues can be detected quickly.
- The built-in web-based config interface makes it simple to use.
Nagios Core and Nagios XI are the two editions of the software. The original package, Nagios Core, is an open-source project, and it is available for free. The Nagios XI system is a premium package edition that builds on a base of the Nagios Core version’s capabilities.
And network bandwidth monitor is included in both Nagios Core and Nagios XI editions. A 1-month free trial of Nagios XI is available.
Site24x7
Site24x7 is a trustworthy and steady bandwidth monitoring tool that provides information at the equipment and connectivity levels. It is a Software as a Service (SaaS) bandwidth monitoring system that uses various robust mechanisms like On-Premise Poller to collect data from the network.
This software allows you to keep track of your whole network architecture, comprising up to 10 workstations and any other networking equipment that have an IP address. This tool also has an integrated SNMP-based sensor monitoring engine, which helps in monitoring sensor-tracked properties by simply building custom module layouts.
Features:
- The console is cloud-based and can be accessed from anywhere.
- Generates reports with detailed graphs
- It tracks various metrics such as latency, and packet drop to enhance the performance of VoIP services across the communication channel.
It is a powerful application that provides a comprehensive set of capabilities to avoid and notify you of potential broadband issues. Ste24x7 offers other tools, such as domain tools, sysadmin, developer, and converter tools.
BitMeter OS
BitMeter OS is a real-time bandwidth analysis and monitoring software that is free and open source.
Its built-in Web Interface provides a wide variety of graphing tools that depict how network bandwidth is used.
It allows the user to set up alarms to notify when the bandwidth threshold levels are crossed. You can also view and examine statistical data based on hours and days.
Features:
- The Interface is easy to use.
- Statistics and reports can be exported in CSV format.
- Remote monitoring with a built-in web interface
This tool works in different operating systems such as Windows, Linux, and Mac OSX.
NetWorX
Another well-known tool for bandwidth monitoring is a NetworX by Softperfect. It is a fully customizable tool with a variety of themes. It monitors data transactions (download and upload) in real-time. NetworX helps the user in the detection of potential network faults.
It shows historical data and allows users to export the data in a variety of formats. A built-in security mechanism helps the user to identify suspicious activities in the network. This tool is available for both Windows and macOS.
Features:
- Monitors the Internet-connected apps and services.
- Tracks the progress of your network load and bandwidth utilization.
- Uploads & downloads are closely constantly monitored.
Softperfect provides other tools also to manage your networks, such as a switch port mapper, WI-FI genius, cache relocator, and print inspector.
BWMonitor
BWMonitor is a simple tool for monitoring your network bandwidth. It comes with a number of useful features, including a speed recorder, transfer rate logger, and bandwidth alerting system. This BWMonitor keeps track of all network connections including VPN connections.
You can also configure and set up alerts if you want to be warned about more bandwidth consumption. This tool is available for only windows. This tool doesn’t require any additional drivers to be installed on your system.
Features:
- At the same time, it can keep track of several network connections.
- Notifies the user about bandwidth usage by email and push notifications.
- Exports traffic information in CSV and HTML formats.
It features a minimal user interface and consumes very little system memory. And this tool is available only for windows.
Conclusion
Various kinds of bandwidth monitoring tools are available, depending on your expenditure and the scale of your network. In order to improve network management, it’s critical to keep track of bandwidth utilization.
In this article, we have listed the best Real-Time Bandwidth Monitors for Network Traffic Usage.
You may also be interested in learning about the best open source monitoring software for IT infrastructure.
