Modern networks are vast and encompass many different infrastructures like cloud, IoT and on-premise. With heterogeneity becoming the new normal, a simple correlation of security events and clarity in the network's behavior can seem like a far-away dream for many IT operators. As the volume of traffic increases, there is no unified view of the network's activity, and many tools' analytics capabilities can be degrading, resulting in irrelevant false positives and blind spots. Analyzing data and finding potential issues in such cases is a huge challenge. From examining the users of the network, the hunt to find the context of an occasional traffic spike, or detecting suspicious incidents, IT administrators require a tool that can demand less of you but provide more insights on every network endpoint.

Blueprint to the best network traffic analysis tool

Network traffic analysis can be overwhelming if you have a tool that doesn't automate your routine. For instance, many tools might require frequent manual intervention, more additional products for different metrics, and don't seamlessly integrate with the existing environment. However, asking the right questions can make a huge difference in choosing and implementing the right solution that fits your business needs. These questions include:

• What technology does the tool rely on?
• How can I easily integrate it in my scaling environment?
• How advanced the features are?

Additionally, the technical depth of the software and how customizable and scalable it is to monitor today's complex IT is where your best judgments should be. Choosing the right traffic analysis tool can help you know:

• How your network bandwidth is being used
• Whether the WAN allows intruders
• How to shape traffic for business critical applications when necessary
• How to detect performance loopholes
• How to plan for any network upgrades
• Reroute traffic for business critical applications only

NetFlow Analyzer, ManageEngine's network traffic analysis and bandwidth monitoring tool, aims to simplify this task for many network admins by offering a set of salient features.

Holistic visibility: NetFlow Analyzer provides bandwidth usage visibility into all nodes such as servers, interfaces, applications, and users. It helps you in identifying traffic trends by up to one-minute granularity to understand the context of traffic spikes, and pinpoints the bandwidth-hogging sources with flow analysis. You can configure the traffic summary dashboards and know the overall performance at a glance.

Scalability: The traffic analysis solution supports businesses of all sizes, from small, medium, and large enterprises. You can monitor up to 10,000 interfaces with distributed network traffic monitoring, which provides visibility into performance and security aspects of all your branch offices under a single console.

Anomaly detection: With proactive alerting systems, forensic investigation, and extensive incident details collation and reporting, you can identify any suspicious activity and take active measures to block or restrict certain traffic from entering the network.

Flexible licensing: NetFlow Analyzer offers you different licensing options that you can choose and pay based on your monitoring requirements. It also offers three different editions, such as Standard, Professional and Enterprise editions, and different add-ons that you can opt for extending the network monitoring scope.

Easy evaluation: Unlike any other tool, you can evaluate NetFlow Analyzer by testing its traffic analytics capabilities in a live environment with a sample NetFlow data with Simulate NetFlow feature before you even purchase it.

Ready to explore the right network traffic analysis tool?

With the increasing inception of new technologies, monitoring has turned into a tough game as high speed networks and a secured attack surface are the two fronts that many enterprises are struggling to achieve. This can be a resource-intensive task if there is less deep insight into the data traffic. If you are seeking a reliable and an affordable solution with a technical depth, then NetFlow Analyzer can bring all your needs under a single software.

Try the 30-day free trial or online demo or get in touch with our technical team who is ready to answer all your queries!

Author Bio: Swetha Balaji

Swetha is a passionate content marketer at ManageEngine, specializing in creating collaterals that provides hacks to address persistent IT performance and security challenges. By collaborating closely with product management and development teams, she brings in solutions that drive admins' better decision-making. When she's not busy crafting tech stories, you can find her reading fictions or learning an art.