Modern enterprise networks are becoming increasingly complex due to the addition of numerous personal devices and a plethora of cloud-based applications, access points, virtual servers, and more. IT teams have to manage bandwidth and quality of service carefully, implement load balancers for high availability, create a redundant environment for backups and failovers, and ensure several components in a hybrid environment work in a synchronized manner.
Benefits of Network Analysis Tools
1. SolarWinds Hybrid Cloud Observability (30-Day Free Trial)
2. SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor (30-Day Free Trial)
5. SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer (Free Trial)
Amidst this complexity, IT administrators often lack clear visibility into their network. This is where network analysis tools come into the picture. They help teams understand what’s happening in their network, see how the data is getting transferred between different nodes and ports, and spot the areas experiencing issues.
Previously, organizations used traditional network monitoring methods like Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP), packet sniffing, NetFlow analysis, etc., to perform basic tasks, collect limited data, and work independently. However, modern network analysis can do much more and give you a competitive edge today.
Benefits of Network Analysis Tools
Modern network analysis tools collect data from numerous sources and analyze this data against various thresholds in real time.
These tools can help you:
- Keep track of performance, bandwidth usage, and bottlenecks
- Identify bottlenecks and spots causing issues like network latency and jitter
- Check Wi-Fi speeds and availability
- Troubleshoot faulty connections
- Have visibility into and detailed view of the traffic flow, block user activities, and assess the impact
- Maintain logs
- Get alerts and reports on anomalies and any unusual activity
- Have better control of your network
- Optimize their network’s bandwidth usage and improve overall performance
Compared with traditional tools, these solutions offer proactive monitoring and an early response to mitigate threats and resolve network issues. These modern network analysis tools also help in advanced capacity planning and allocating a budget for networking tasks.
5 Top Network Analysis Tools
As discussed, network analysis tools and practices are constantly evolving. To meet changing demands, vendors add new features to their network analyzers every year. We’ll review some of the best tools available in the market below:
- SolarWinds Hybrid Cloud Observability
- SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor
- SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer
- PRTG Network Monitor
- NetSpot
1. SolarWinds Hybrid Cloud Observability (30-Day Free Trial)
©2024 SolarWinds Worldwide, LLC. All rights reserved.
SolarWinds® Hybrid Cloud Observability is an easy-to-use software that helps you visualize, monitor, and enhance your on-premises network, infrastructure, and services. This way, you can see how your network performs and ensure real-time availability. This tool enables you to detect and diagnose service and compliance issues and potential security threats using artificial intelligence for IT operations (AIOps). Another exciting thing is that it allows users to create customizable dashboards to monitor specific key performance indicators (KPIs) of their hybrid cloud IT infrastructure and services.
Furthermore, you can gain service-level objective (SLO) insights, rapidly identify degraded service performance, and accurately predict and plan resources to prevent network issues and unplanned downtime. Unlike other tools, Hybrid Cloud Observability offers flexible control where you only pay for the necessary tools.
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2. SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor (30-Day Free Trial)
©2024 SolarWinds Worldwide, LLC. All rights reserved.
SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor (NPM) includes an extensive set of features to monitor network faults, ensure High Availability (HA), and troubleshoot performance bottlenecks to help you determine if it’s an application in a network. You can create and customize dashboards to view real-time and historical network performance metrics. For instance, the Quality of Experience (QoE) dashboard provides a simple view of traffic, response times, critical transactions, et, to help you determine if it’sts network issues or an application bug degrading the experience. With this dashboard, you can also detect traffic anomalies easily.
NPM’s NetPath™ feature can help you resolve network latency–related issues. It tracks the movement of packets in a network from origin to destination, giving you a granular view of traffic, device configurations, and performance metrics in real-time. Another important feature is the heat-mapping feature, which helps you get a real-time view of Wi-Fi signal strength across your premises. Unlike other tools in the market, NPM offers smart alerting with reduced false positives.
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3. PRTG Network Monitor
PRTG Network Monitor supports end-to-end network analysis and monitoring with SNMP, NetFlow, and packet sniffing features. The tool gives you a bird’s-eye view of your network, showing bandwidth consumption by different applications and devices. You can also track consumption across different IP addresses and protocols to get a granular view of bandwidth usage and troubleshoot issues efficiently. Further, NetFlow technology limits your CPU consumption. With SNMP monitoring, you can keep track of traffic levels across your networking hosts, routers, and hubs. The tool offers a wide range of “sensors” to track various performance metrics in a network. The pricing of the solution depends on how many sensors you deploy to monitor and analyze your network.
4. NetSpot
NetSpot is a free Wi-Fi analyzer and professional tool for macOS and Windows. This tool is simple and easy to use. It displays useful Wi-Fi data using two different modes, i.e., discovery mode and survey mode. The discovery mode shows every minute detail of a Wi-Fi network, while the survey mode displays color-coded interactive heat maps to show the strength of Wi-Fi connections. It allows users to identify zones of low connectivity. NetSpot is a perfect solution for network engineers as it also helps them check security settings, unauthorized workstations, cross-channel interference, and rogue access points. All you have to do is mark your location on the map, and NetSpot will start analyzing the wireless signal immediately.
5. SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer (Free Trial)
©2024 SolarWinds Worldwide, LLC. All rights reserved.
SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer (NTA) is a specialized Wi-Fi and network traffic analysis tool. NTA allows admins to analyze wireless LAN controller traffic and helps them keep a tab on those applications on your network that cause congestion. NTA can also send timely notifications whenever there is a sudden or unexpected change in the traffic of applications. The tool allows admins to discover traffic patterns and provides greater visibility into malicious traffic flows.
It is important to know that SolarWinds NTA is used with SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor (NPM), as the combination of both tools creates a complete network monitoring software package. You can also integrate both with other platform tools in the SolarWinds ecosystem.
Conclusion
To ensure organizations maintain a proper balance between their security, connectivity, and productivity needs, IT teams need the best-of-breed solutions for managing and analyzing their networks. A robust network analysis tool in place will allow you to move to next-generation network architectures seamlessly.
Further, you should aim to implement scalable and future-ready solutions to simplify network analytics and give you better actionable insights to make smarter, business-oriented, and customer-centric decisions.