Network traffic, also called traffic or data traffic, refers to the data moving across a network at any given time. Network data consists of packets, the smallest, fundamental units of data passed along a network. Network traffic data is broken into these packets for transmission and reassembled at the destination. Packets consist of payloads (the raw data) and headers (the metadata) containing information like origin and destination IP addresses.
There are four broad categories of network traffic:
- Busy/heavy traffic, where high bandwidth is consumed
- Non-real-time traffic, which refers to the bandwidth consumed during working hours
- Interactive traffic, traffic facing competition for bandwidth, which results in slow response times if prioritizations for traffic and applications aren’t set
- Latency-sensitive traffic, which can also result in poor response times due to competition for bandwidth
Why is network monitoring important?
Gaining insights into network traffic is important when managing and measuring bandwidth (the amount of data that can be transmitted in a set amount of time) and maintaining functional bandwidth is critical to service delivery.
Analyzing your network traffic can have many benefits. It can help identify network bottlenecks, which occur when there isn’t enough data handling capacity to manage the volume of traffic currently passing through. It can also help what identify users or applications are the network top talkers. This analysis has security benefits as well, since an unusually high amount of traffic in a network can indicate a cyberattack.
Analyzing network traffic can also provide insights into current and past bandwidth usage patterns, allowing you to better understand your organization’s future network needs. By measuring the amounts and types of data traveling across the network, admins can better manage it to make sure the most important processes receive the required bandwidth.
How to check network traffic
Here are some basic steps required to manually check network traffic through a router:
- Access your router by entering your router’s IP address into a web browser.
- Once you sign in, look for a Status section on the router (you might even have a Bandwidth or Network Monitor section depending on the type of router).
- From there, you should be able to see the IP addresses of devices connected to your network.
- For most modern routers, you should be able to click through on a device level and overall network to see traffic activity.
For any organization, knowing the number of connected devices and their usage is a good first step in understanding the potential bandwidth requirements needed to support the amount of traffic on a network. However, this surface-level traffic data often doesn’t support the ability to see or act on this information at scale for devices across your environment.
The best way to check network traffic is with a tool like SolarWinds® Bandwidth Analyzer Pack (BAP). BAP is built to automatically check and compile network traffic insights from devices across your network in a centralized dashboard and alert you to any concerning behavior in your network.
How to monitor network traffic activity
The first step in monitoring network traffic activity is to understand what you’d like to monitor or the issue you’re trying to solve. This includes monitoring traffic to servers, firewalls, or other devices on your network or for a specific issue like bandwidth usage or packet loss. By first identifying the goal of the monitoring, you can limit your focus to the most important metrics to your analysis and the best tools to use to perform this troubleshooting.
For example, monitoring traffic activity at the packet level can help you understand how packets travel between devices to ensure your services are being delivered. Monitoring the traffic activity between network devices can also provide insights into whether packets are being lost due to insufficient bandwidth. Using commands like tracert can provide some visibility into packets, but a packet sniffer, also called a network analyzer or a protocol analyzer, is built to intercept, log, and analyze network traffic and data. Insights into packet origin and destination, dropped packets, fluctuations in packet traffic, and similar data points can signal issues and help admins pinpoint the location of network activity issues.
What is a network traffic monitor?
While a sniffer can provide packet-level insights, only a network activity monitoring solution is designed to help you answer the question of whether network traffic levels normal for your infrastructure. Beyond simply monitoring network traffic, it’s important to have a network traffic monitoring tool to measure traffic and provide detailed analysis, allowing you to implement policy changes and maximize your bandwidth capabilities.
The network traffic monitor tool in SolarWinds BAP is designed to help you identify network traffic issues with ease, so you can improve your bandwidth capabilities to ensure good performance for end users.
How does network traffic monitoring work in BAP?
SolarWinds BAP is built to monitor how traffic moves between devices and if the end-user experience is affected via packet metadata to calculate application and network response time in addition to having the ability to compare past and current levels of network traffic to highlight trends. The PerfStack™ feature streamlines root cause identification with the option to correlate performance metrics on a drag-and-drop timeline. For admins who can’t be at their dashboard 24/7, BAP supports advanced network alerting. Use simple or complex trigger conditions to set automated alerts with the details you need to help speed troubleshooting, then configure those alerts to send to the admins of your choice.