Monitoring Network Traffic

Good network monitoring software continues to send status messages and traffic to efficiently keep track of any outages on the network. Network monitoring watches hardware such as router or network servers for responses. Depending on the software, it can send response requests every minute up to every hour. It can also detect outages in certain software such as web server or email applications. The software can send an HTTP request to monitor a web server, or it can send an SMTP message to an email server. If there is no reply from the respective software or server, the network monitoring software interprets it as an outage and promptly alerts a network administrator.

The importance of up time for a network has increased with the reliance on technology and work computers. Even a small business can lose thousands of revenue dollars by the hour as their network stays down. This increase of lost revenue gives value to a good network monitoring software. Even after hours, network monitoring software can make sure your network administrator staff is quickly alerted so that solutions can be expedited to lower lost revenue during unexpected down time.

Network monitoring can also give vital statistics to businesses to evaluate down time. The statistics can help network administrators analyze issues on the network to better prepare for future outages. Other statistics can give a percentage of up time versus down time to evaluate profit and loss for businesses that rely heavily on network availability.

Normally, the network monitoring is done at the layer above the layer where you're LAN or Network card is placed. Once the computer identifies any destination, it processes the data packets and triggers them to through the physical network card. Before it could actually reach the LAN card, the network monitor received every incoming or outgoing packet which it parses and stores in its interface for the administrator to look over at a later stage. Thus now we know what network monitoring is.

At times it becomes highly essential for the administrator to take a network monitor capture to understand weird behavior identified on the network and amongst network nodes or computers. There are not of sophisticated Network monitoring utilities available in the market. The one that is packages along with the windows operating system is know as Network Monitor which is easy to use and reveal a lot of interesting information about each and every packet that has been captured. All you have to do is to specify a network interface or LAN interface in the Network Monitor application and it will start the capture what all is coming in and going out.

Apart from this network monitoring can also be done with the use of third party application which will install a network monitoring service in all your client workstations or computers and servers. This service must be installed on each and every workstation and server which would be linked with the monitoring and reporting server. The purpose of this service would be to trigger an alert incase something goes bad in any machine. Almost all the companies today are using such alerting and network monitoring service to get hold on each and every device in their premises. This is essential in those cases where the computer have been compromised or hacked and the administrators are alerted immediately. To proof that you have been hacked, lot of investigations are conducted to gather proof of the incident which can be used for any lawful intercept.

If the network monitor traces have been gathered, they can be sent over to the network forensic department for close watch to identify the source of its origination as every company would like to know from which IP address they have been attacked. This can help in getting hold of the suspected person or at-least the premises from which this happened.

Conducting network monitoring with proper software is the best thing. Proper network monitor software can identify future and present problems with the network. Network monitors perpetually monitor computer networks for failing or slow systems, and in case of outages via pagers or e-mails, they notify the administrators.

In the case of network problems or network failure, network monitors automatically tell the network administrator about it and compose expanded log files. Network monitors also takes correct action by rebooting the system or running a script. Problems caused by crashed or overloaded servers or network connections are monitored by network monitors. To ensure the condition of an e-mail server, network monitor software sends a test message through Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP), which is received by Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP). To ensure the condition of a web server, network monitor software sends HTTP a request to get a page.

With a network monitor, users can monitor any IP-networked device on his LAN. Most network monitors have the ability to detect a wide range of issues, like failed logins, someone using particular protocols, or connecting to particular sites. Most network monitors supervise Internet usage and also register fingerprints of each and every network connection in its database. Using a network monitor, a user can trace out worms, browser toolbars, viruses, plug-ins and more. A built-in pager and e-mail alarm keeps the network administrator informed on important situations.

A network traffic monitor informs which applications in a machine are causing how much network traffic, and over which IP port this traffic is occurring. It can identify peak usage hours, application usage and more. A user can view details on the host, recent traffic patterns and applications that are generating network traffic. A network traffic monitor, with just a few clicks, shows everything that passes through the network's pipes. One can easily filter the network traffic to concentrate on certain information that is much needed.

A network traffic monitor debugs new applications that involves network communication and troubleshoots network related problems. Some network traffic monitors have technology that allows the decoding and restoring of network traffic in an easy format, so that even a novice user can understand it. A network traffic monitor can track the entire process of incoming and outgoing traffic, all uploads and downloads, instant messaging conversations, sent and received e-mails, and viruses. Many software companies offer free trial versions of network traffic monitors to promote their company.