subject: How to Deal with Bandwidth Misuse [print this page] How to Deal with Bandwidth Misuse How to Deal with Bandwidth Misuse
Sometimes while working in network management, you simply need more information. Statistics that go really deep into your network usage is crucial to being positive that you are making the right decisions in your organization. You may have policies and guidelines for how the corporate network should be used, but as we all know most users choose not to listen and visit sites like youtube and Pandora, which are major bandwidth consumers. Some organizations have tried implementing proxy filtering which blocks specific video and social networking sites, but the reality is that if users want to access these types of things, the savvy ones will find a way to do it anyways.
You may not win the battle by using your proxy to limit certain sites, but your surely can with the right information. Most network monitoring solutions provide metrics and traffic detail that allows administrators to understand how their network is being used . Known as a traffic analyzer, this software can go out and grab a stream of traffic from your system and give you the details you need to optimize for best performance.
How does this work? Networking equipment comes with specialized flow software that can be plugged into these tools. For example, Cisco has something called Netflow while Juniper uses J-Flow. Whatever the name may be, these technologies allow you to have some pretty cool insight into what's going on by sending this information via SNMP to your traffic analyzer.
With this information at your fingertips, you are able to map your traffic. This can be done from specific ports and IP addresses over to applications. You can also look at what protocols are being used the most by your network. This is especially helpful at the application layer, where you can then look at detailed reports to see what you may need to clamp down on.
You can also use Cisco's Class Based Quality of Service (CBQoS) which is built into their IOS. The purpose of CBQoS is for both congestion avoidance as well as congestion management and can be a great way of ensuring that the right network traffic is getting the priority that it deserves.
If you're not using flow analysis and CBQoS right now, you should consider getting onboard with these two. You'll be better able to troubleshoot network performance problems by having the right information in place before there is a problem. In fact, you may even save your company some cash by not having to expand you network just for people who are not using their time properly by surfing around on the internet while they are at work.
