MONITORING AND MANAGEMENT OF NETWORK TRAFFIC

As company intranets continue to grow it is increasingly important that network administrators are aware of and have a handle on the different types of traffic that is traversing their networks. Traffic monitoring and analysis is essential in order to more effectively troubleshoot and resolve issues when they occur, so as to not bring network services to a stand still for extended periods of time. Numerous tools are available to help administrators with the monitoring and analysis of network traffic. This paper discusses router based monitoring techniques and non-router based monitoring techniques (passive versus active). It gives an overview of the three most widely used router based network monitoring tools available (SNMP, RMON, and Cisco Netflow), and provides information about two newer monitoring methods that use a combination of passive and active monitoring techniques (WREN and SCNM)