6 Best Bandwidth Monitoring Tools in 2024

By Staff Contributor on May 23, 2024

Your network relies on reliable data transmission. Not only could troublesome connections yield negative results for customers, but connectivity issues could also indicate deeper problems within your network. However, if you monitor your bandwidth consistently and carefully, you can maintain your network’s health and solve issues as they arise.

I suggest investing in a network bandwidth monitor, which can analyze each device’s bandwidth consumption while saving you energy, resources, and brainpower. My top pick is from SolarWinds—SolarWinds^® SolarWinds Observability Self-Hosted (formerly known as Hybrid Cloud Observability), which offers extensive bandwidth monitoring capabilities designed to help ensure your network’s speed is maintained and managed properly.

What Is Network Bandwidth Monitoring?

Benefits of Network Bandwidth Monitoring

6 Best Bandwidth Monitors

SolarWinds Observability Self-Hosted (formerly known as Hybrid Cloud Observability) (Free Trial)
SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor (Free Trial)
ManageEngine NetFlow Analyzer
BW Monitor
PRTG Network Monitor
NetWorx

What Is Network Bandwidth Monitoring?

Network bandwidth monitoring observes your usage through tracking patterns and discovering details to help you better understand your status and determine your network needs. Bandwidth is a network’s capacity to transmit data between devices. It’s an amount of time, usually measured in bits per second (bps), although larger multiples can also be used.

Higher bandwidth yields faster rates of data transfers, which allows your network to support more connected devices. If networks are roads, bandwidths determine the size—the more bandwidth, the more space for information to travel. Even the best-performing network is susceptible to issues like latency, jitters, packet drops, and congestion. Bandwidth monitoring determines if your network is working fast and reliably and if devices are using a fair and healthy amount of bandwidth.

Benefits of Network Bandwidth Monitoring

Bandwidth monitors enable you to easily keep track of your network’s bandwidth usage, customize distribution, and discover potential bottlenecks and outages. Here are some actions you can achieve.

Dive Into Detail

A bandwidth monitor could gather statistics on specific devices plus your entire network, helping paint a complete picture of your network’s bandwidth use. Some monitoring software even enables the creation of visual graphics, like charts and top lists, allowing you to compare device bandwidth data.

Prep for the Future

Network bandwidth monitors are designed to constantly look out for bandwidth hogs, traffic congestion, and other potential threats, so you’re never scrambling to solve problems. Many monitors can identify trends indicating a greater need and will notify you when you’re due for an upgrade in bandwidth capacity.

Display Data in Real Time

Many bandwidth monitors automatically update their information, keeping your statistics live and everyone on the same page. Real-time data graphics enable you to clearly understand your network’s information, helping make better decisions about bandwidth utilization and spot issues.

Boost Network Performance

By analyzing traffic patterns, response times, and uptime/downtime of devices, monitoring tools allow you to know better how your network is performing. Also, excessive bandwidth can sometimes be an indicator of deeper problems—by detecting troublesome devices, network bandwidth monitors may help you discover other critical issues.

Save Money and Time

Deciding to expand your bandwidth can be a difficult decision, and monitoring tools can help you determine the best time to grow your network’s bandwidth threshold. Bandwidth monitoring software is designed to help you discover solutions to shortages, traffic congestion, and other performance issues before purchasing unneeded capacity.

6 Best Bandwidth Monitors

1. SolarWinds Observability Self-Hosted (formerly known as Hybrid Cloud Observability) (Free Trial)

SolarWinds Observability Self-Hosted (formerly known as Hybrid Cloud Observability) is a robust full-stack observability tool offering bandwidth monitoring capabilities. Some of its key features include deep usage analysis, network quality management, network infrastructure monitoring and observability, vulnerability dashboards, AIOps correlation, alerting and customizable reports, and more. It collects and analyzes network traffic data to discover bandwidth usage, malicious network traffic, and devices experiencing network slowdowns across hybrid environments (e.g., on-premise and multi-cloud).

This information is presented clearly, helping you get an overview. SolarWinds Observability Self-Hosted (formerly known as Hybrid Cloud Observability) automatically generates cloud summaries that capture network bandwidth and traffic visualizations, letting you quickly notice and troubleshoot issues. You get an overview of all cloud instances enabling you to compare bandwidth usage. You can organize data by IP addresses, applications, and other groups.

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2. SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor (Free Trial)

The SolarWinds^® Network Performance Monitor (NPM) is a complete network performance solution with bandwidth monitoring. NPM gives you a holistic overview of your network’s health and performance metrics. It does this by offering plenty of additional contextual and comprehensive network information. That way, you can identify which devices consume the most bandwidth. NPM’s key features include Network Insights for deeper visibility and Intelligent Maps, NetPath™, and PerfStack™ for easy troubleshooting, smarter scalability for large environments, advanced alerting, and more. These features help you stay informed, allocate resources, and prevent potential connectivity problems.

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To further boost your NPM capabilities, add SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer (NTA). NTA automatically monitors your network’s traffic, helping you address critical performance issues while remaining focused on your tasks. NTA is designed to isolate devices as you investigate excessive bandwidth usage and other suspicious activity. It also alerts you when your threshold is approaching, indicating an interface is close to exceeding its utilization limits. Using NPM allows you to diagnose and remediate bandwidth problems before they escalate quickly.

3. ManageEngine NetFlow Analyzer

ManageEngine NetFlow Analyzer is an agentless bandwidth monitor designed to support real-time analysis, data collection, and alert notifications. This tool offers the ability to generate long-term reports, helping you better prepare for the future. ManageEngine NetFlow Analyzer enables you to collect data on which devices are hogging bandwidth, so you can address usage issues with vital knowledge.

Detecting bandwidth hogs could also lead to the discovery of external and internal threats, and ManageEngine NetFlow Analyzer uses steam mining engine technology to continuously search for unwanted visitors. Along with bandwidth monitoring, ManageEngine NetFlow Analyzer could help you gain full visibility into your network’s performance metrics, devices and interfaces, and access points. ManageEngine NetFlow Analyzer supports Cisco technologies like CBQoS.

4. BW Monitor

BW Monitor is a great monitoring tool because it allows you to work with most network connections, including Ethernet cards, wireless, VPN, and cable. Generate real-time bandwidth traffic graphs with average uptimes/downtimes in line or column form with customizable features.

BW Monitor also logs data to provide daily, weekly, and monthly usage reports, plus a summary of all-time usage. BW Monitor includes a “speed stopwatch,” which enables you to test bandwidth, broadband, internet, and ADSL. One key distinction between BW Monitor and other monitoring software is that BW Monitor only tracks bandwidth usage on the device it’s installed to. However, there are some ways to manage multiple network connections simultaneously.

5. PRTG Network Monitor

PRTG Network Monitor can gather traffic data from your network’s sensors, providing details on which servers use the most bandwidth. This data can help you detect and diagnose disruptions and then quickly address them in the right way. PRTG Network Monitor could display this vital information through graphs, top lists, or charts based on a wide template of parameters.

PRTG Network Monitor also has built-in tools like the Packet Sniffer, which monitors header traffic of data packets, so you can understand the information flowing through your network. This network software also lets you monitor SNMP, NetFlow v5 and v9, and Cisco. Enable custom alerts about bandwidth shortages via email, SMS, or push notifications using PRTG Network Monitor. PRTG observes sensors, not devices—one sensor usually monitors one device, so you’ll need five to 10 sensors per device or one sensor per switch port.

6. NetWorx

NetWorx can enable you to measure your internet’s bandwidth usage alongside other metrics. It’s meant for viewing network devices on a local machine but can monitor traffic for smaller networks using SNMP protocols. A great feature of NetWorx is its ability to monitor and log traffic to create visualizations of daily, weekly, and monthly usage trends. You can then export those reports to a multitude of formats for easy communication and problem resolution. NetWorx is designed to perform network tests like ping, traceroute, and speed tests. The best feature of this network bandwidth monitor is its highly customizable alerts and interfaces, which allow you to pick your own visuals and sounds, notify you when unusual activity occurs and automatically shut systems down if necessary.

Summary

Bandwidth monitors are essential to ensuring your network’s speed, security, and success. Use dedicated software to analyze your traffic patterns and discover bandwidth hogs, bottlenecks, and available network storage. My top choice is SolarWinds Observability Self-Hosted (formerly known as Hybrid Cloud Observability), which can organize important statistics and cross-monitor your network’s data.