Network bandwidth Congestion

Network congestion can occur in many ways. Most often, it is caused by high bandwidth usage in specific segments or over a thin connection such as a remote office. Bandwidth congestion can happen by the presence of peer-to-peer file sharing programs, huge data transfers, unscheduled backups, poorly configured data routing (such as email), large email attachments, poor broadcasts and multicasts, etc.

Another form of congestion can occur due to the spraying of small but numerous packets. This can occur from ARP storms, worm propagation, scanning activities, etc.

All of the reporting in nLive brings our both types of traffic-metrics — traffic volume as well as event count. Therefore, congestion can be immediately spotted from charts and graphs. In additions, there are several 'problem detectors' that will be triggered when congestion causing activities occur. So one can see them in the problems tables and reports. As a third source of this information, one can see high 'scores' for machines that are involved in this sort of activities. Drilling down using the mouse on any of these user interface elements can help you quickly get to the bottom of it.