SolarWinds Real-Time Bandwidth Monitor

If bandwidth usage is a problem you are concerned about, an application such as SolarWinds Real-Time Bandwidth Monitor can be of great help. As its name suggests, its purpose is to poll bandwidth usage and help you manage it in an efficient manner.

Creating a new monitoring session requires you to provide information about the target device, namely its IP address or the hostname, the SNMP version it uses, and the community string.

If the credentials are valid, the application proceeds to show you a list of all the SNMP-compatible interfaces that can be monitored, be it a router, a firewall, a switch or a server. In this new window, you have to choose one or more interfaces to monitor before proceeding. There are additional settings you can tamper with, namely the amount of history data the application should remember, and the warning and critical threshold levels.

SolarWinds Real-Time Bandwidth Monitor displays the bandwidth usage in real-time, in a chart that updates itself periodically (the time period depends on the user-defined polling interval). It keeps an eye on both the incoming and outgoing network traffic, collecting data and storing it all. Such a tool comes in handy for troubleshooting performance-related issues, and maintaining a healthy load balancing configuration.

To ease your work, SolarWinds Real-Time Bandwidth Monitor also stores your credentials for each of the supported SNMP versions. This way, each time you need to provide login information for the bandwidth monitor, you can go to the designated section and copy the information you need.

Although it is definitely not a full-featured network monitoring application, SolarWinds Real-Time Bandwidth Monitor has, without a doubt, a place in the toolbox of a network administrator. Aside from the bandwidth usage evolution, it can determine when bandwidth usage is out of bounds and send you a notification.