Monitor bandwidth utilization on any physical or virtual interface Detect interface flapping conditions or changes in the operational state of any network interface Detect duplex mismatches Monitor frame collisions, errors and drops Collect event and error logs, as well as SNMP trap messages, with full integration with email and pager alert system

One of the basic requirements for pro-active network management is insight into bandwidth utilization. Network administrators need to have insight into the volume and composition of traffic on the network. This information is critical to the smooth operation of a complex network.

There are a few different approaches to bandwidth monitoring, each which has its own inherent advantages and disadvantages. Netmon supports a number of independent approaches to bandwidth monitoring. This allows administrators to compare results from different methodologies to overcome the shortcomings of each. Administrators can also choose the methodologies that are the most appropriate for their particular situation.

Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) is almost universally used by routers, switches and other infrastructure devices to report bandwidth consumption, among other status and performance data. Most devices conform to the industry-standard IF-MIB, and this is the basis of the Netmon dashboard and monitoring implementation for SNMP.

SNMP data provided by infrastructure devices has some inherent limitations. It does not report on protocol distribution or conversations, thus the insight into network activity is shallow. Additionally, reliance must be placed on the SNMP implementation of the router manufacturer.

In many scenarios, traffic sniffing can be used to supplement SNMP bandwidth consumption data. Data from a traffic sniffer is more in-depth than SNMP data. Sniffed traffic can be analyzed to reveal protocol distribution, as well as provide independent verification of bandwidth consumption reported via SNMP.

Traffic sniffing has some downsides as well as advantages. Without extremely high-end network hardware, some amount of loss in traffic data is inevitable. Further, the amount of loss will vary according to network conditions and the overall load on the sniffing device. Also, traffic sniffing can be restricted by infrastructure devices (only relatively high-end switches support the port-spanning features required for effective sniffing). Finally, traffic sniffing with a single device will, in many networks, not be able to "see" all traffic.

Some infrastructure devices support other traffic reporting protocols, such as sFlow and NetFlow. These protocols are designed to provide more granular data than SNMP while still relying on infrastructure devices to provide them in summary form.

These traffic reporting protocols have the disadvantages that they are not universally supported as SNMP is. This means that a homogenous infrastructure would be required to fully use a protocol such as NetFlow for bandwidth monitoring purposes.

Netmon Software Edition, Professional Edition and Enterprise Edition support all of the monitoring methods described above, which allows an administrator to decide which monitoring method makes the most sense for each particular scenario, or network segment.