Is Your Network Glad the Olympics Are Over?

Numerous prognosticators predicted network meltdowns as a result of the increase in streaming video from the Olympic Games. The Los Angeles Times reported Internet traffic had spiked about 20% because of live Olympics streaming and the CTO of Los Angeles municipality had emailed thousands of City Hall employees, asking them to stop watching the games online at work. Another study stated that Games enthusiasts followed the proceedings on two or more personal devices.

Tackling the bandwidth crunch


The Olympics may have officially come to an end, and hopefully your network did not melt down, but that does not lessen the need for effective network traffic monitoring. Companies should prepare themselves to ensure bandwidth consumption is actively managed. Some key focus areas should be:

  • Monitor network bandwidth & traffic patterns down to the interface level
  • Identify your bandwidth hogs: which users, applications, and protocols are consuming the most bandwidth
  • Understand what protocols and IP addresses are consuming bandwidth. 

If you’re primary concern is to measure and control traffic to avoid congestion and poor performance by the variety of devices on the network, it is important to have a solution that addresses all the above best practices. If so, you may be interested in checking out a netflow analyzer tool which helps monitor network traffic and gives you visibility into the performance of your QoS policies that you may have established on your network.

Let us know, did streaming video from the Olympics have any impact on your network?

The Winter Games will be here sooner than you think.  Will your network be ready?

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