Bandwidth monitoring is one of the most critical activities of an network administrator. You need to be able to monitor bandwidth usage patterns over the course of a day as well as usage pattern over a week. A good bandwidth monitoring tool will give you real time alerts when the bandwidth usage of a link is abnormal. Note that this definition of "unusual" could be dfferent for different links and you need to be able to setup the thresholds based on the individual link's usage pattern.
Bandwidth Monitoring - Proactive and Real-time
Real-time bandwidth usage alerts can help troubleshoot securty or virus problems in an enterprise. Abnormal bandwidth usage can indicate that someone is trying ot flood your network or a network on your devices has been infected and sending out large amounts of traffic trying to infect other computers on the network.
Historical bandwidth statistics are essential for trend analysis and projecting when you need to upgrade your link. Accurate trend analsys requires historicla data for several months to be accurate and predict the number of days before you hit thresholds.
