Network monitoring is the technique which is used to see what's happening in a computer network. In business, a network monitoring system monitors many things such as incoming threats to the network, components which slow the network down, data transfer, crashed servers and many things.
For a home user though, network monitoring simply means monitoring the download and upload rates of the computers in a network, usually in order to see what's taking up too much bandwidth. Today, I will be talking about network monitoring for home users.
It's rather easy to monitor your network lately, thanks to the variety of network monitoring software around the internet. With the help of a software, you can dynamically see the data transfer in your network, you can prioritize or limit the things you want to, you can balance the traffic for different computers in the network if you are sharing the connection, (You can split the connection equally between two computers for instance in order to prevent one person's downloads interfering with the other's internet experience) you can set rules such as assigning different volumes of traffic to different applications for different times of a day, week, or month. It's totally up to you how you want to customize your network.
If you are interested in this, I would recommend using NetBalancer, since it's a fairly easy and effective network monitoring software to use. You can find more information about NetBalancer here. Note that there are many alternatives to NetBalancer, but you can trust me on this one! After downloading and setting the software up, you will see a screen similar to this.
This is the main window, which you will be spending most of your time in. You can see all the processes which are running on your computer in this window. It shows you the download & upload rates for the specific processes here. You can simply right click a process, and change priority, block, or limit the download/upload speed of this particular process. As a real life example, let's assume I'm playing an online game and downloading something at the time. Apparently, it makes my game lag so that I can't play. In this scenario, I can just push my game's priority to high, and the software will make sure that the download isn't interfering with my gameplay.
There are also two graphs at left and right bottom, total internet usage and connections of the process you selected respectively. You can see which IPs a process is connected to, which can sometimes help you see if something dodgy is happening.
For a home user though, network monitoring simply means monitoring the download and upload rates of the computers in a network, usually in order to see what's taking up too much bandwidth. Today, I will be talking about network monitoring for home users.
It's rather easy to monitor your network lately, thanks to the variety of network monitoring software around the internet. With the help of a software, you can dynamically see the data transfer in your network, you can prioritize or limit the things you want to, you can balance the traffic for different computers in the network if you are sharing the connection, (You can split the connection equally between two computers for instance in order to prevent one person's downloads interfering with the other's internet experience) you can set rules such as assigning different volumes of traffic to different applications for different times of a day, week, or month. It's totally up to you how you want to customize your network.
If you are interested in this, I would recommend using NetBalancer, since it's a fairly easy and effective network monitoring software to use. You can find more information about NetBalancer here. Note that there are many alternatives to NetBalancer, but you can trust me on this one! After downloading and setting the software up, you will see a screen similar to this.
This is the main window, which you will be spending most of your time in. You can see all the processes which are running on your computer in this window. It shows you the download & upload rates for the specific processes here. You can simply right click a process, and change priority, block, or limit the download/upload speed of this particular process. As a real life example, let's assume I'm playing an online game and downloading something at the time. Apparently, it makes my game lag so that I can't play. In this scenario, I can just push my game's priority to high, and the software will make sure that the download isn't interfering with my gameplay.
There are also two graphs at left and right bottom, total internet usage and connections of the process you selected respectively. You can see which IPs a process is connected to, which can sometimes help you see if something dodgy is happening.
On the picture above, I just pushed Heroes of Newerth to high, and let BitComet at normal, so I can play my game without any problems! Let's take a quick look at the traffic rule setting as well.
I right clicked BitComet on the main window and added a rule for it. You can see on the picture that I chose the days Saturday and Sunday, and changed the Upload setting to Blocked. With this rule, BitComet won't be able to do any uploading at weekends. I'm sure many people will find use for this great feature, since if some time is put into it, it can make it a lot easier to use your internet connection effectively. Next up is the level severity option.
Remember the priorities we set earlier for our processes? This is the tool where you can choose how low your "low"s, and how high your "high"s will be. You can optimize this according to how fast your download and update rates are.
This would be network monitoring for home users in a nutshell. It's simple, isn't it? No more fighting with your girlfriend cause she's downloading and slowing your game down, no more problems with loading pictures while downloading and many more examples you can think of!
