Network Congestion
Resolve network issues fast with network congestion solution
Perform a network congestion test to isolate instances of high bandwidth use
SolarWinds® NetFlow Traffic Analyzer (NTA) identifies network congestion issues fast and displays the specific endpoints or applications consuming the most bandwidth. Isolate bandwidth usage issues with an intuitive point-and-click interface and flow data analysis from multiple vendors, including NetFlow v5 and v9, Juniper J-Flow, sFlow, and more. After performing a network congestion test, you can adjust policies for better management, so you don’t spend money on unnecessary bandwidth.
Streamline and optimize troubleshooting by revealing network top talkers
Pinpointing network congestion causes can be challenging in large or complex enterprises. NTA helps you detect network congestion and discover which specific users and applications are responsible for the bottlenecks caused by network congestion. You can target the top talkers on your network consuming the most bandwidth and help reduce network congestion problems by limiting their use. NTA also allows you to track traffic arriving from designated ports, source IPs, destination IPs, and protocols.
Identify network congestion causes using cross-stack network data correlation
NTA’s data correlation feature offers deep visibility into your network traffic using multiple views. The SolarWinds PerfStack™ dashboard helps you identify network congestion causes and visualize traffic patterns by dragging and dropping network performance metrics onto a common timeline, for immediate visual correlation across your network data. You can investigate, isolate, and monitor excessive network bandwidth utilization and unexpected application traffic to help prevent recurrent network congestion issues.
Decongest your network and improve flow using customizable network traffic reports
If your enterprise does business over video chat, poor voice or video quality caused by network congestion can hurt your productivity. NTA helps you improve traffic flow and enhance end-user experience with numerous QoS features. This network congestion solution lets you segment traffic by Class of Service methods and compare pre- and post-policy CBQoS class maps, so you can optimize your policies. Also, QoS reporting helps you verify the effectiveness of your policy over time.
Use comprehensive network congestion monitoring to improve network security
Sometimes network slowdowns aren’t caused by high bandwidth usage, but by malicious activity. NTA helps you improve your network security by offering deep visibility into any malicious or malformed traffic with port 0 monitoring. TCP/UDP monitoring of port 0 will highlight any traffic flows directed through port 0, which helps you identify traffic potentially indicating suspicious activity.
Get More on Network Congestion
Do you find yourself asking…
Network congestion occurs when a network node becomes overwhelmed with traffic and can be a common problem for admins.
Network traffic often occurs because of how the internet is designed. Internet traffic is controlled by the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP), which is an algorithm designed to determine the path of internet traffic. BGP will direct traffic along the shortest possible distance, not the fastest path or the path with the most bandwidth. As such, all data follows the same short path. During low-to-moderate traffic periods, this approach works well. However, if too much data tries to follow the same path, it’ll cause network congestion.
Network congestion is closely related to latency, throughput, and bandwidth. Latency refers to the speed of your network traffic measured in milliseconds, and high latency numbers indicate a slower network. Acceptable latency numbers vary by application and network connection uses—for instance, video calls tend to require low latency.
Throughput is an actual measure of how much data successfully makes it from source to destination in a set amount of time, while bandwidth is a measure of ideal capacity, that is, how much data could be transferred from source to destination in a certain amount of time. Throughput directly measures speed while bandwidth is only indirectly related to speed. When there isn’t enough bandwidth on your network to handle all traffic moving along the shortest path, latency increases and throughput decreases. Network congestion can also cause timeouts and packet loss.
It’s impossible to eliminate network congestion altogether, but there are many ways to reduce it. Congestion management refers to any formalized strategy designed to avoid, reduce, or temporarily eliminate network congestion and its effects on the network. These types of network congestion solutions are comprised of a mechanism designed to lessen the impact of the congestion, and a detection trigger to turn on the mechanism. However, network congestion solutions taking this approach vary widely in terms of effectiveness and complexity. For accurate and actionable insights, admins can use network congestion monitoring tools to perform a network congestion test.
Network congestion occurs when a network node becomes overwhelmed with traffic and can be a common problem for admins.
Network traffic often occurs because of how the internet is designed. Internet traffic is controlled by the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP), which is an algorithm designed to determine the path of internet traffic. BGP will direct traffic along the shortest possible distance, not the fastest path or the path with the most bandwidth. As such, all data follows the same short path. During low-to-moderate traffic periods, this approach works well. However, if too much data tries to follow the same path, it’ll cause network congestion.
Network congestion is closely related to latency, throughput, and bandwidth. Latency refers to the speed of your network traffic measured in milliseconds, and high latency numbers indicate a slower network. Acceptable latency numbers vary by application and network connection uses—for instance, video calls tend to require low latency.
Throughput is an actual measure of how much data successfully makes it from source to destination in a set amount of time, while bandwidth is a measure of ideal capacity, that is, how much data could be transferred from source to destination in a certain amount of time. Throughput directly measures speed while bandwidth is only indirectly related to speed. When there isn’t enough bandwidth on your network to handle all traffic moving along the shortest path, latency increases and throughput decreases. Network congestion can also cause timeouts and packet loss.
It’s impossible to eliminate network congestion altogether, but there are many ways to reduce it. Congestion management refers to any formalized strategy designed to avoid, reduce, or temporarily eliminate network congestion and its effects on the network. These types of network congestion solutions are comprised of a mechanism designed to lessen the impact of the congestion, and a detection trigger to turn on the mechanism. However, network congestion solutions taking this approach vary widely in terms of effectiveness and complexity. For accurate and actionable insights, admins can use network congestion monitoring tools to perform a network congestion test.
Eliminate network congestion and get operations back up to speed
NetFlow Traffic Analyzer
- Monitor bandwidth use by application, protocol, and IP address group to reduce network congestion.
- Get alerted if application traffic suddenly increases, decreases, or disappears completely.
- Analyze network congestion causes over time by drilling down on any network element.
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