Network Bandwidth Management and Control Software

Bandwidth management, also referred to as bandwidth control, involves measuring and controlling how bandwidth is used on the network. Bandwidth is the maximum rate at which data will transfer on a network.

By using bandwidth management software, you can better control how data transfer is handled on a network, given bandwidth constraints. If bandwidth isn’t monitored and controlled, users run the risk of encountering network congestion and poor network performance.

Bandwidth control works by using bandwidth monitoring to gain visibility and insights into a network to help improve bandwidth utilization and overall network performance.

This first step to control bandwidth is by identifying devices, users, or processes consuming too much bandwidth. With this insight, you can determine the best way to limit and manage bandwidth usage. Common bandwidth control methods include:

• Traffic limiting or shaping. Traffic shapers, also known as packet shapers, are designed to limit the bandwidth and the speed assigned to certain data streams, which enables users to limit bandwidth from certain applications or even specify how much bandwidth is available for individual users.
• Quality of Service (QoS) checking. This process can be used alongside traffic shapers. If packet shaping is designed to limit low-priority network traffic, QoS checking prioritizes the most important network traffic to ensure it’s sent out before other traffic bogs down the network and delays arrival times.

Bandwidth control is important because it lowers the risk of network bottlenecks and helps improve overall system performance. When your network becomes overworked, its performance can be negatively affected. It’s important for users to enforce bandwidth control to keep network speeds optimized.

Bandwidth management software is built to automate the bandwidth control process by monitoring network devices and applications, analyzing consumption, and providing insights in real time to help users make better decisions about bandwidth utilization. Not only can automating bandwidth management save valuable time, but it can also improve the quality of monitoring.

Bandwidth management tools can help you measure, check, customize, and limit the distribution of your bandwidth and data rates at any point in time.

Bandwidth management capabilities within SolarWinds Observability Self-Hosted help users better analyze network traffic patterns. SolarWinds Observability Self-Hosted can collect flow data and help users view traffic patterns on a network, either over long periods of time or second by second. With these insights, users can improve their bandwidth monitoring.

Bandwidth management capabilities within SolarWinds Observability Self-Hosted enable users to easily inspect and isolate unwanted network traffic by highlighting where busy network bandwidth exists. They can also help you identify which users, applications, and protocols are consuming the most bandwidth, so you can better allocate resources and take more informed measures to resolve or prevent bottlenecking.