Using the network bandwidth monitoring program to estimate employee effectiveness

The head of a good company must always be aware of how many resources his company uses, how much funds are spent, what are the current expenses in electricity, telephony and other resources. In the last 10 or 15 years, a more significant expense element was added: running a modern business is impossible without an internet connection. To find out how much you have to pay for it, you first need to know how much traffic is being used on your network if your Internet connection is not unlimited. That is why the system administrator must monitor the network bandwidth and the traffic usage on the local network to use the company’s resources efficiently.

Even if the organization has the unlimited traffic package, bandwidth monitoring is still vital. For example, the bandwidth may be less than the necessary limit, and there are many reasons for this: employees may use the traffic for personal matters and download movies or music from the Internet, network interfaces may stop working, and so on. All of these problems lead to your business operating ineffectively, losing your profits and increasing expenses.

There are a few ways to collect traffic and bandwidth usage data:

1. Using the SNMP Protocol (Simple Network Management Protocol). This method does not require the installation of additional programs on remote computers. And this is the main advantage of this method. The bandwidth monitoring program should be installed only on the system administrator’s PC. All you have to do is configure the SNMP protocol correctly, which usually doesn’t take long. The SNMP protocol enables you to count the volume of Internet or local network traffic not only on Windows or Linux operating system computers, but also on switches, routers, network printers, and other network devices. Therefore, the system administrator can monitor the network used and the volume of Internet traffic and monitor the normal operation of all hardware on the network.

2. Alternatively, the system administrator can useWMI (Windows Management Instrumentation) for bandwidth monitoring. The advantage of this method is that it is not necessary to implement the additional software on remote network computers running under Windows.

3. If it is not possible to use the SNMP or WMI protocol for some reason, bandwidth monitoring can be performed on some remote agents, which are generally included in the bandwidth monitoring program package and must be installed on remote computers for traffic data collection. The agent is generally released as a service, so it is not visible to users (it operates in the background).

4. Bandwidth monitoring can also be done through the NetFlow protocol developed by Cisco Systems to collect IP traffic information on local networks. Statistics of all transferred packets are collected in a special buffer and then processed. This method allows you to track traffic in large companies with complex networks. But hardware that supports the NetFlow protocol is quite expensive, and no organization can afford to use it.

5. Using a packet analyzer or tracker. With this method of bandwidth monitoring, you can learn the IP addresses of the sender and receiver of a packet. This allows to know what the Internet traffic is spent on. This method requires processing every packet that is sent over the network. This is why this procedure is quite resource consuming and can hardly be used on high traffic networks.

Using at least two or three of these bandwidth monitoring methods in a complex way allows you to get a complete picture of an organization’s performance. Monitoring traffic through several protocols at the same time and building graphical charts based on the collected data help to identify guilty employees who use company resources for personal matters and to discover what they do: watch videos online, using messengers, hanging on social media, viewing photos, etc.

You can configure the response of the monitoring program to particular events (for example, if a network interface fails or critical limits for the volume of traffic used are exceeded, etc.). This allows the system administrator or IT manager to respond to these events immediately and repair faults in time. In addition, the bandwidth and traffic monitor helps the manager to know the current expenses of the organization and to draw correct conclusions about the efficiency of the operation of the company’s employees.

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