Netflow

Bandwidth Detective: Uncover Hidden Traffic and Eliminate Network Bottlenecks

2026-04-07T14:38:10+10:00

In this article, we explore the core principles of bandwidth management and examine how modern network monitoring technologies can assist in maintaining network efficiency. In particular, we look at how solutions like NetFlow Analyzer empower network administrators with detailed network traffic visibility, enabling them to proactively detect anomalies, analyse bandwidth usage, and resolve network performance issues before they impact users.

Key Topics Covered

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Get your Bandwidth Detective and start uncovering hidden traffic

With today’s increasingly complex network environments, managing network bandwidth is no longer optional—it is a critical requirement for ensuring stable and efficient operations. Modern networks support a wide range of applications, from real-time communications and cloud services to large-scale data transfers, all competing for limited resources. Without proper visibility and control, network congestion can quickly lead to degraded performance, poor user experience, and potential business disruption.

Effective bandwidth management enables organisations to prioritise critical applications, prevent unnecessary traffic from consuming valuable resources, and maintain consistent network performance across the infrastructure. By implementing the right network monitoring tools and traffic analysis solutions, administrators can gain deep insight into traffic patterns, identify bottlenecks, and make informed decisions to optimise overall performance.

Businesses today rely heavily on advanced network monitoring solutions to maintain operational continuity. These tools play a vital role in proactively identifying issues, strengthening network security, ensuring high availability, supporting scalability, and optimising infrastructure costs. Leveraging flow-based technologies such as NetFlow, administrators can achieve granular visibility into network traffic flows and gain the actionable insights required to effectively manage bandwidth in dynamic IT environments.

Netflow vs SNMP. Two Different Approaches to Network Monitoring

2022-03-24T16:11:46+11:00

SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol) and Netflow are both popular protocols with admins, prized for their ability to give visibility over the network and in some cases discern the cause of network performance issues, network bottlenecks, system resource allocation issues and more. On the Netflow side of things, third-party software vendors like ManageEngine can greatly enhance the usability and capability of the protocol, while SNMP network monitoring applications like PRTG, Solarwinds or alternatively open-source Observium, Nagios and LibreNMS take the lead in delivering a comprehensive in-depth network and system monitoring solution.

Unfortunately, however, the close relationship between the two protocols, especially when it comes to software offerings, has birthed some misconceptions. While it’s common to see SNMP and Netflow as more or less interchangeable, there are some significant and key differences between the two that make them suited for very different use cases.

Key Topics:

Understanding SNMP and How it Works

The Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) surfaced as early as 1988, with its roots in its predecessor, the Simple Gateway Monitoring Protocol, which was defined in 1987. SNMP was born out of pure necessity – before its existence, network admins didn’t have much visibility over their infrastructure at all. After the crash of the ARPAnet, on the 27^th of October 1980, and as the number of complex components in networks began to snowball, it was clear a solution was needed.

However, though SNMP was initially built by a group on university researchers as a temporary solution, it quickly evolved, has remained very relevant even today. It’s not considered part of the application layer of the Internet Protocol Suite and OSI model and exists across three major versions (through SNMPv1 still tends to be the most commonly used).

Though SNMP’s name suggests management, it’s more commonly used for the monitoring of different types of network equipment, both on a network and hardware level. Typically, a monitoring server (e.g Nagios, Observium) known as a SNMP Manager monitors devices on the network, with each system holding a software snmp agent that reports information back to the manager:

Illustrating how SNMP works

The SNMP protocol’s job is to send Protocol Data Units (PDUs) messages to other devices in the network, requesting information via an SNMP Get-Request. The sum of the Get-Responses it receives lets network admins track network events via the data it receives. The speed of this process lets admins keep an eye on a network in almost real-time, which is in many cases invaluable. While the SNMP query interval is customizable in every SNMP monitoring application, it is typically configured to poll the monitored device every 5 minutes.

SNMP operates on port 161 and uses UDP as its transport protocol.

Understanding Netflow and How It Works

Though we have covered Netflow extensively in our Complete Guide to Netflow, it’s worth quickly brushing over it. The Cisco Netflow protocol is newer than SMNP, beginning its evolution in 1996 with Cisco’s IOS v11.x. Though it was initially designed a software technique, the company soon implemented hardware-based Cisco Netflow solutions in its switches and expanded it to other hardware.

Netflow consists of three components:

Netflow Exporter: Typically, a router or firewall that gathers packets into flows and exports flow records to collectors when it decides the flow of information has exported.
Netflow Collector: A server that receives the aggregated flows and stores and pre-processes them for use by the Netflow Analyzer.
Netflow Analyzer: A software-based solution that provides necessary insights into the data collected, such as ManageEngine.

Netflow's components: Flow Exporter, Flow Collector and Flow Analyzer

As you can see, the two protocols (Netflow – SNMP) differ significantly in their technique and makeup, there are some areas they cross over and others where they’re significantly different.

Netflow records are exported by the Flow Exporter using the UDP transport protocol. Common ports used are 2055, 9555, 9995, 9025, 9026 and are usually configurable.

Netflow vs SNMP: Similarities and Differences, using Real Examples

As both Netflow and SNMP provide network monitoring, there’s some crossover with the information they provide. Both can give a quick overview of the bandwidth usage and utilization to the end-user, and these days both protocols are supported by all major vendors, though SNMPs age still means it has an advantage in that regard.

However, it’s past that the SNMP protocol and Netflow begin to diverge. As mentioned earlier, SNMP provides a real-time overview of the network, but Netflow is a little more limited. Though it tends to provide more verbose information, it isn’t live, instead returning data in predetermined intervals that tend to cap out at a couple of minutes at the shorter end. Additionally, SNMP operates in both push and pull modes, while Netflow is primarily a push technology.

Netflow, however, is more compact and delivers more information in many areas when compared to the SNMP protocol, which is in many ways quite crude. Unlike SNMP, Netflow can filter traffic and differentiate bandwidth usage by protocol or IP. The enablement of filtering and differentiation by protocol and application gives a complete overview of link to application utilization, while SNMP is limited to the interface level.

The example below shows how SNMP (top graph) and Netflow (bottom graph) report traffic passing through a monitored interface on a network device (firewall). While both protocols are capable of showing the overall traffic passing through the interface, Netflow provides a per-application break-down of traffic:

Comparing SNMP and Netflow network traffic reports from the same source

When monitoring WAN links within an organisation, it is critical to have the ability to properly analyze traffic. SNMP graphs are simply not enough. In the above example, ManageEngine’s Netflow shows the bittorrent application responsible for a large portion of the bandwidth used.

An unexpected spike in traffic can signal problems, a security issue or even a breach in the company’s IT policies. This example highlights an important difference between SNMP and Netflow when used to monitor traffic.

The knock-on effect of this is that Netflow tends to be more difficult to setup. Most of the time, getting netflow configured can be somewhat tricky depending on the device and netflow version supported. Its verbosity also means it can be more intensive and require more bandwidth than SNMP depending on the amount of traffic passing through the monitored links, however with today’s high-bandwidth links this shouldn’t be of any real concern.

Despite this, there is an area where SNMP provides information where Netflow doesn’t – hardware. SNMP is capable of monitoring CPU, memory, disk space, temperature for devices, and more, something Netflow has only been able to do so far in proof of concepts.

The below screenshot is an example of an SNMP-monitored Palo Alto Next-Gen Firewall:

Monitoring a Palo Alto Next-Gen Firewall via SNMP

Our SNMP monitoring server is configured to poll the firewall every 5 minutes and pull a significant amount of information that includes internal bandwidth usage, CPU, memory and storage usage, temperature, event logs and more.

Netflow vs SNMP: Advantages and Disadvantages, using Real Examples

It should be evident that each protocol has different use cases but they also complement each other. When it comes to analyzing traffic information, Netflow is clearly the winner, and it also scales better on the high-traffic networks that professionals are more likely to see.

Netflow’s ability to differentiate and filter by protocol or application means network security professionals can determine which end system is using excessive bandwidth but also assist identifying possible security threats.

The below screenshot, taken from ManageEngine’s Netflow Analyzer, is a great example on how Netflow can assist in identifying abnormal traffic patterns, including malformed packets, excessive flows and more:

ManageEngine's Netflow security threats interface

In practice, this means you can utilize Netflow to monitor specific aspects like voice and video quality across a network, something just not possible with SNMP. This includes link latency, jitter, call path availability and other important metrics.

The verbose data also better lends its hand to reporting, which can then be used for network planning or other considerations. For example, you can quickly produce capacity planning reports, get an accurate overview of trends over a long period, and measure bandwidth growth over time. It can also recognise even non-standard applications or those who use dynamic port numbers.

Capacity planning with ManageEngine

The SNMP protocol’s main advantage is that it is supported widely by almost every type of device that connects to the network and is capable of delivering strong, basic traffic visibility with very low overhead. It can provide efficient quantitative information, including bandwidth, but also detailed system resource usage:

SNMP monitoring of an ESXi host (click to enlarge)

In the above example, our SNMP monitored host is a lab ESXi server with its SNMP service enabled. The amount of information obtained by SNMP is impressive and detailed: Server information, model number, operating system, port utilization, memory and storage usage, CPU usage and more, are tracked and updated every 5 minutes.

Drilling into further detail, e.g CPU usage, is simple as hovering on-top of the CPU, allowing a pop-up embedded window appear, revealing each core usage over time:

SNMP monitoring of an ESXi's host CPU (click to enlarge)

Combining this information with automated alerts, makes SNMP monitoring a powerful tool that cannot however be replaced by Netflow.

Conclusion

The SNMP and Netflow protocol are both standards for a reason. They both have their advantages and disadvantages, and generally both can be used simultaneously to monitor different aspects of a network and its critical devices. Netflow’s aid in network planning and traffic analysis makes it, in many cases, the more helpful tool to network administrators. On the other hand, SNMP’s capabilities to provide overall traffic graphs and detailed resource usage, make it a favourite for system administrators.

Third-party advanced tools like ManageEngine combine the best of both SNMP and Netflow by monitoring every aspect of the network in a simple yet information packed-UI and enabling monitoring of traffic shaping technologies, security alerts, SLAs and more.

Though those interested in networking and system administration should naturally try both SNMP and Netflow tools for themselves, no regrets will be found after taking the time to utilize Netflow and its more diverse functionality.

Complete Guide to Netflow: How Netflow & its Components Work. Netflow Monitoring Tools

2020-05-19T17:40:05+10:00

This article will cover the basics of Netflow, including its use cases, Netflow supported devices, Netflow history, and variants. We’ll also dive into the technical details of how the Netflow protocol works, including the Netflow ports, and the various Netflow versions. This will lead onto coverage of the various Netflow components, including the Netflow Exporter, Netflow Collector, and Netflow Analyzer, with some brief coverage of its main competition.

Key Topics:

Introduction to Netflow – What is Netflow Used for?

Visibility plays a key role in the maintenance and security of any network. With it, admins can identify issues, discover non-compliant users, refine their provisioning, and more. Netflow is a protocol developed by CISCO that fulfils this purpose, letting interested parties understand network patterns and protocol distribution, while supporting more granular data like IP service type for diagnosis.

Its relatively low overhead and trusted history means that Netflow is still around in some forms a decade after its release. As well as user and application monitoring, admins utilize Netflow for network planning, application reporting and profiling, security analysis, and usage-based reporting and billing.

Broadly, a flow is a group of packets part of the same conversation between two endpoints in a network. More technically, a single flow is defined by its 5-tuple, a collection of five data points that include:

Source and destination IPs addresses
Source and destination ports
The protocol

As you’d expect, the Cisco-developed protocol is supported by a number of CISCO networking devices. The company’s IOS-XR routers use a software implementation running on line card CPU, while the IOS line runs software on route processor. Meanwhile, Catalyst and Nexus switches have a dedicated hardware TCAM implementation, generally supporting more flows.

Netflow History, RFC, Netflow Vendor Variants

Of course, Cisco isn’t the sole vendor of devices with Netflow-like support. Netflow began its evolution in 1996 with IOS 11.x as a software technique, rather than a hardware one. Initially, it was designed for LAN and scaled poorly, resulting in the rise of the express forwarding technique. Cisco, seemingly recognising the value of its solution, later enabled hardware-based implementations, which allow for higher bandwidth.

However, with the rise of Netflow came a number of other popular vendors trying to cash in on it. In a bid to avoid trademark battles, various competitors implemented their own flavors of the technique. Juniper’s jflow is one such example, as well as Huawei’s NetStream, and HP’s SFlow.

With the various solutions complicating matters, the IETF released IPFIX as the official standard in 2008. Making matters more confusing, IPFIX is sometimes referred to as Netflow v10. In reality, the latest official version of Netflow is v9, with IPFIX simply bearing some similarities. Netflow version 9 is described in RFC 3954 on the informational track rather than standards. IPFIX is on the standards track with RFC 7012.

Netflow is generally supported in three versions. Cisco did not publicly release versions 2-4, and v1 is naturally obsolete. Routers and switches most commonly support Netflow v5, v8, and v9, with v6 out of support and v7 seemingly exclusive to Catalyst 5K series switches.

Netflow records are exported via UDP and received by the Netflow Collector, which we’ll dive into more later. Suffice it to say that the IP address of the collector and the UDP destination port must be configured on the sending router, with the most common port being UDP 2055. Some Netflow implementations protect against packet loss through use of SCTP, however, this is not always performant if multiple independent collectors are in play.

Netflow Protocol Transport and Ports. What Can I See with Netflow?

As mentioned earlier, a Netflow enabled device inspects a number of parameters to define differentiate flows. These provide some natural, basic visibility. The source and destination addresses can tell admins who is sending and receiving traffic, for example. The ports show which applications are utilizing the traffic, class of service indicates the priority, and the interface how traffic is being utilized by the device.

However, the collection of various data points can lead to information beyond this. Tailed packets and bytes reveal the amount of traffic, and can be combined with data like timestamps for bytes per second, TCP flags to examine handshakes, subnet mask for prefix calculation.

The amount of real-world benefit often depends on the analysis tools at your disposal. With the right Netflow Analyzer, admins can use collected data to determine the following:

General traffic patterns
Diagnosis of slow performance, including network bottlenecks
Unusual network behaviour
The network impact of certain applications
Unauthorized WAN traffic, unusual network behaviour such as DoS
QoS validation

Netflow Components: Netflow Exporter, Netflow Collector and Network Analyzer

To fully understand Netflow, it’s necessary to have an idea of its various components and how they function. It consists of three components: the Netflow Exporter, Netflow Collector, and Netflow Analyzer. Each of these has a different role, and is often based on different hardware.

These are fairly self-explanatory. The Netflow Exporter is an appliance or network device, an example device is a router or firewall. It gathers packets into flows and exports flow records to collectors when it decides the flow expires.

The Netflow Exporter determines which flows are new by the 5-tuple data points mentioned above. When packets enter the network, they’re checked against a table of recent flows called the flow cache. If the packet matches an existing 5-tuple, information such as packet count and byte length for the flow is updated. If not, a new entry is created.

The router expires flows, exports them, and removes them from the cache. It takes indications from TCP flags, such as FIN or RST, or when one of two requirements are met:

In an inactive timeout, flows expire when no packets have been detected in a set period. The default for this is usually fifteen seconds, but it can be adjusted to a network’s needs.
An active timeout happens for the opposite reason – the flow has been maintained for too long. If a flow doesn’t expire, the admin won’t get any data on it, so this is necessary to maintain visibility. The default is typically 30 minutes, but one minute is more popular in practice.

The Netflow Collector is a server or appliance that receives the aggregated flows, storing and pre-processing it for use by the Netflow Analyzer. The Netflow Analyzer is software-based and provides the necessary insights.

Click to visit

It often takes pains to present information in a digestible form, with graphs, tables, alerts, and reporting tools.

Netflow vs SNMP – What are the Differences?

If you’ve heard of Netflow, you likely know of SNMP. However, a popular misconception is that they’re similar. We’ll have a detailed explanation of this soon, but the bottom line is that the two protocols are very distinct. They take different approaches to monitoring, and are applicable in different scenarios.

Unlike Netflow, SNMP can return real-time data. This has obvious advantages, but it also comes with some downsides. Though it’s excellent at giving visibility of the network and bandwidth usage, it’s not as verbose. SNMP doesn’t maintain important information for network admins such as what a user or application is doing, the type of traffic, or source/destination addresses.

Essentially, SNMP can reveal that there’s an issue, but it’s not ideal for figuring out the cause. Though versions are fast and low-overhead, it’s often used for a quick overview, whereas Netflow can be utilized as well as, or separately, for more in-depth analysis.

Netflow vs IPFIX – What are the Differences?

When it comes to Netflow and IPFIX, the mix-up is even more prevalent. In this case, it’s entirely understandable. IPFIX is sometimes referred to as Netflow v10, was created by some of the same people, is derived directly from Netflow v9, and is backward compatible.

Even so, there are several reasons it should be considered a separate entity. IPFIX offers more flexibility when expanding outside of the Cisco ecosystem. It can, for example, add information usually reserved for the Syslog, or integrate SNMP info directly in the packet.

It’s worth noting that Netflow v9 comes close to this functionality with its Flexible Netflow support, but it does require further configuration. On top of this, IPFIX holds one big change in that it supports a vendor ID. Users can assign an ID to any piece of data for gathering, which is a large boon.

So why not use IPFIX from the start? Well, flexibility isn’t always better. It can mean more chance of incompatibility and confusion. IP If Netflow suits the needs, it’s sometimes not worth complicating matters. Again, we’ll be covering this in a dedicated IPFix and Netflow article with more technical detail. The main idea to keep in mind is that though IPFix is preferred in many scenarios, it’s not always the best suited to the job.

Summary

This article provided a basic understanding of the Netflow protocol and how it works, including the Netflow Exporter, Netflow Collector, and Netflow Analyzers. We’ve covered its history, protocol transports, and common ports, as well as its RFC status.

You should also recognise the benefit Netflow holds for network admins, letting them get a general overview of traffic patterns while also aiding in the diagnosis of bottlenecks, flagging DoS attacks, enhancing network planning, and more.

Finally, we’ve covered briefly some of the differences between the protocol and SNMP or IPFIX.

NetFlow Analyzer: Free Download, Step-by-Step Installation, Configuration & Optimization Windows - Linux

2019-06-16T17:35:13+10:00

In our previous article we explained how a Netflow Analyzer can help you gain visibility into your user traffic, application traffic and data flows while at the same time analyze traffic patterns, detect unusual traffic, verify bandwidth availability, detect Quality of Service (QoS) problems and a lot more.

In this article we will introduce Network Analyzer - a bandwidth and traffic analysis tool that helps you monitor the bandwidth utilization in your network and analyze the who, when, what of your network traffic. It uses flow technology to give you real time visibility into your network and supports all major flow formats such us netflow, sflow, jflow, IPFIX, and appflow.

Network Analyzer helps you to drill down into interface level details to discover traffic patterns and monitor device performance, recognize and classify Non-Standard Apps that hog your network bandwidth, and detect security threats. Using a network bandwidth monitoring tool like NetFlow Analyzer allows you to monitor all these critical parameters in real-time.

Key Topics:

Easy Installation

NetFlow Analyzer is available for Windows and Linux platforms. For information on supported versions and other specifications, look up System Requirements.

Installing NetFlow Analyzer

Windows:

Download NetFlow Analyzer for Windows
Double-click it to start installation. Follow the instructions as they appear on screen to install NetFlow Analyzer on to your machine successfully. NetFlow Analyzer supports both, PostgreSQL and MSSQL as database. Select the desired database and click Next.

Linux:

Download NetFlow Analyzer for Linux
Assign execute permission using the command: chmod a+x ManageEngine_NetFlowAnalyzer_xxxx.bin where ManageEngine_NetFlowAnalyzer_xxxx is the name of the downloaded BIN file.
Execute the following command: ./ManageEngine_NetFlowAnalyzer_xxxx.bin

Note: During installation if you get an error message stating that the temp folder does not have enough space, try executing this command with the -is:tempdiroption parameter where is the absolute path of an existing directory:

./ManageEngine_NetFlowAnalyzer_xxxx.bin -is:tempdir

For non-x11 machines, use the following command:

./ManageEngine_NetFlowAnalyzer_xxxx.bin -console

Follow the instructions as they appear on the screen to install NetFlow Analyzer on to your machine successfully.

Once you have successfully installed NetFlow Analyzer, start the NetFlow Analyzer server by following the steps below.

Setting up NetFlow Analyzer

Windows:

Click on Start > Services > start the ManageEngine OpManager to start the service.

Alternatively you can navigate to the bin folder in a CMD prompt and invoke the run.bat file to start as application.

Linux:
Navigate to the /bin directory and execute the ./run.sh file.

When the server is started, a command prompt window opens up showing startup information on several modules of NetFlow Analyzer. Once all the modules have been successfully created, and the server has started, connect your client at http://localhost:8060

The default port is 8060 and it will be replaced by the port you have specified as the web server port during installation.

Starting as Service

Windows:
If you have chosen the Start as Service option during installation, NetFlow Analyzer will run as a service on Windows.

Linux:

Login as root user.
Navigate to the bin directory.
Execute the linkAsService.sh file
Then execute the command systemctl start OpManager.service

This starts NetFlow Analyzer as a service on Linux.

Getting Started with NetFlow Analyzer

Once you download and install NetFlow Analyzer, the next big step is to get started with the basic initial settings. As soon as you launch NetFlow Analyzer, the Getting started window pops up, giving you an overview of the steps to follow.

With its built-in templates, NetFlow Analyzer allows you to export flows and discover your devices at ease. NetFlow Analyzer saves you the time and hassle of manually configuring flows and devices by allowing you to export flows directly from the UI in four simple steps and automating the device discovery with its pre-defined configlets.

Summary

With a complete bandwidth analysis tool like, NetFlow Analyzer, you will be able to plan and optimize your bandwidth usage better, avoid bottlenecks, and connectivity issues, detect unusual traffic patterns and security threats, thereby drastically improving your network performance and user experience and security posture. Get a free personalized demo or check out the product for free for 30 days!

Netflow: Monitor Bandwidth & Network Utilization. Detect LAN, WAN, Wi-Fi Bottlenecks, Unusual Traffic Patterns, Problems and more

2019-05-05T02:45:51+10:00

Monitoring network traffic & bandwidth usage via Netflow is mandatory for any type and size network. Gaining visibility into user traffic, application traffic and data flows allows network engineers, administrators and security specialists detect bottlenecks – network congestion, unusual traffic patterns, monitor SLA agreements with providers, verify bandwidth availability, detect Quality of Service (QoS) issues, Wi-Fi Network monitoring, plus much more.

Key Topics:

Related articles:

Netflow: Discovering & Monitoring Your Network Traffic

Netflow is a network protocol developed by Cisco used to collect IP traffic information and monitoring network traffic. It’s used and supported in almost any network and has become the de-factor industry standard.

Other vendors support similar flow technologies, here are a few examples:

HP/3Com, Dell and Netgear: s-flow
Juniper: Jflow
Ericsson: Rflow
Alcatel-Lucent: Cflow
Huawei: NetStream

IT infrastructure has become much more sophisticated in the last decade and equally complicated. With the market growing every day, customer expectations are higher than ever. Networks are no more limited within a firewall. Now it extends to public and private clouds, and SaaS. This makes it more important for network admins to ensure faster connectivity between the user, and the public and private clouds or data centres.

The primary objective of bandwidth analysis is to monitor the performance of your network, and this can include different types of bandwidth utilization such as application traffic, wireless network, Wide Area Network (WAN) or Local Area Network (LAN) utilization, etc., where every device, service, and individual user is competing for their share of bandwidth. While the immediate solution for traffic congestion could be increasing your bandwidth capacity, the challenge is in realizing if your enterprise even requires that extra bandwidth. And in case you find yourself unable to provide sufficient bandwidth to users based on their needs or unable to control non-business traffic, you are not alone.

Network admins cannot manually keep track of everything going on in your network 24x7, and according to reports and surveys conducted by Packeteers, at least sixty to seventy percent of network managers don’t know what is traversing their networks. Your network is prone to various attacks, and congestions or spikes in your network could be caused by internal or external threats that can vary from DDoS attacks to your own business-critical applications.

As we can appreciate, it is extremely important the network tools used are capable of providing enough information and visibility so we can monitor, identify and troubleshoot effectively and efficiently as possible.

A common question is what capabilities should the bandwidth monitoring tool provide?

Important Features in a Netflow Monitoring Tool: Visibility

The first step to identifying and preventing network issues before it affects your network is real-time monitoring. An effective bandwidth monitoring tool must help you understand which applications in your network are consuming the most bandwidth, the top talkers in the network, and how much traffic is being used at any particular time. This helps you identify the problem users and keep in under control.

Important Features in a Netflow Monitoring Tool: Troubleshooting

A bandwidth monitoring tool should not only help you monitor bandwidth, but should also help you identify performance issues like traffic spike and bandwidth hogs. It must be able to alert you in real-time, helping you troubleshoot the issues before it affects your end users.

Important Features in a Netflow Monitoring Tool: Network Capacity Planning

An ideal bandwidth monitor should also be able to help prevent unwarranted spending on broadband fees. It must help you track bandwidth usage patterns and plan your bandwidth requirements and help to pick the perfect data plan or ISP you require, as your network grows.

Important Features in a Netflow Monitoring Tool: Security Analysis

One of the most important aspects that you should consider, especially in recent times, is network security. And it is vital when your business depends on wireless network and cloud services for all its major activities. A stable and efficient network security system is essential to protecting client data.

There are a large number of security concerns your network can face any time like worm attacks, zero-day attacks and Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS) attacks. Considering recent attacks like the DDOS attack on GITHUB, which was traced to over a thousand different ASNs where the traffic spiked up to 1.35 Tbps, it's always better to be prepared for scenarios.

Github inbound traffic reached 1.35Tbps during the attack

Important Features in a Netflow Monitoring Tool: Monitor Media Rich Traffic

The volume of video traffic in networks is growing everyday with increasing dependence on video conference, video calls, and virtual boardrooms, it is important to keep a check on how much of your bandwidth is used for this, to ensure the quality of the media and also to make sure other applications are not affected by this.

ManageEngine NetFlow Analyzer: An Efficient, Precise, Reliable Professional Netflow Tool

NetFlow Analyzer is a bandwidth and traffic analysis tool that helps you monitor the bandwidth utilization in your network and analyze the who, when, what of your network traffic. It uses flow technology to give you real time visibility into your network and supports all major flow formats such us netflow, sflow, jflow, IPFIX, and appflow.

It helps you to drill down into interface level details to discover traffic patterns and monitor device performance, recognize and classify Non-Standard Apps that hog your network bandwidth, and detect security threats. Using a network bandwidth monitoring tool like NetFlow Analyzer allows you to monitor all these critical parameters in real-time.

ManageEngine NetFlow Analyzer: Real-time Visibility

NetFlow Analyzer's Inventory acts as a directory for traffic overview, providing detailed traffic reports by device, interface, applications, and QoS. You can also drill down to see the top sources, destinations, and conversations, highlighting the top talkers in your network, for detailed analysis. NetFlow Analyzer has a very simplified, easy-to-use and customizable GUI. You can custom filter, sort, and customize the view of your bandwidth graphs.

Click to enlarge

ManageEngine NetFlow Analyzer: Customized & Advanced Alerting

Create and manage alerts profiles, set custom threshold-based and link-down alerts, and get notified in real-time in case any violations. NetFlow Analyzer gives you options to get alerted via SMS, Email, SNMP trap, or even log SDP tickets.

Click to enlarge

ManageEngine NetFlow Analyzer: Capacity Planning & Traffic Shaping

NetFlow Analyzer helps you recognize and identifies usage patterns and application growth by measuring your bandwidth growth over a period time with long term reporting. Capacity planning reports helps you foresee your future needs, helps you make informed decisions on your bandwidth growth. NetFlow Analyzer also helps you identify bandwidth hogs and reconfigure your policies with its traffic shaping options to optimize your bandwidth usage by ensuring priority of your business critical app. You can also leverage on-demand billing and schedule bill plans for individual customers or departments based on bandwidth utilization, or even use it to verify your ISPs billing.

Click to enlarge

ManageEngine NetFlow Analyzer: Security

NetFlow Analyzer's advanced security analytic module identifies junk traffic using its advanced mining algorithm and categorizes them based on the issues. It helps you detect a broad spectrum of external and internal security threats using Continuous Stream Mining Engine technology, track network anomalies that surpass your network firewall, and identify context-sensitive anomalies and zero-day intrusions.

Click to enlarge

ManageEngine NetFlow Analyzer: Reporting

Customize and generate reports with NetFlow Analyzer’s various reporting features available. NetFlow Analyzer allows you to generate Search, Compare, Consolidated, and Forensics reports among many others, schedule them, create report profiles, and export them as email, PDFs, or CSVs.

Click to enlarge

ManageEngine NetFlow Analyzer: Distributed Monitoring

The Enterprise Edition of NetFlow Analyzer is built for large distributed networks. A typical distributed networks' setup involves a single Central Server and "n" number of Distributed collectors based on number of remote locations where the collectors collect & process the flows from the routers and passes the compressed data to the Central Server through a secure connection, and the Central server stores the data from the collectors and provides a centralized web console for generation of reports. It is scalable up to 80,000 flows/sec and lets you monitor all remote locations from a single centralized console.

Summary

In this article we explained how Netflow, the industry standard in network and bandwidth monitoring can provide clear and precise view of your network status, link bandwidth utilization, but also extend to give an insight on application traffic, user traffic patterns and more valuable metrics and data. We also showed how a complete bandwidth analysis tool like NetFlow Analyzer, can help you plan and optimize your bandwidth usage better, avoid bottleneck, and connectivity issues thereby drastically improving your network performance and user experience. Get a free personalized demo of NetFlow Analyzer or check out the product for free for 30 days!