Anything that will do what you ask is going to need an agent installed practically everywhere. What people fail to understand is that when you sniff traffic you can only sniff traffic that is specifically going to/from the Host you are doing the sniffing from (plus any broadcast and maybe some multicast) No one is running hubs anymore,…networks are all switched and switches create virtual circuits between each pair of communicating Hosts, so the only Hosts who know what is leaving and coming into them is the hosts themselves. So the agent has to be on the Host and then reports back to the monitoring station periodically. Anything modeled like this is going to be $$$$$,…and the product will generate a lot of traffic all by itself just doing what it does.<\/p>\n
You asked about bandwidth monitoring in the subject but what you are really asking about is network analysis.<\/p>\n
BTW - Video and Audio are not the performance killers (this isn’t the 1990’s). Audio and Video travel at the rate they were encoded (plus a little more to fill the buffer),…the rate they are encoded at is measured in kbps,…not the mbps that the cabling runs at,…just to put that into perspective. That is why you can watch a video over an Internet connection that is many times slower than your LAN Cabling. If they were the performance killers that people thought they were then it would be impossible to stream them over an Internet connection.<\/p>\n
However the player and file-type being used can matter since some players load the whole file into ram before playing it,…so it is basically a file transfer,…and then “0” traffic once it start playing<\/p>\n
The real performance killers are file transfers. It doesn’t matter if it is transferring to/from the internet or between local machines on the LAN,…but file transfers will try to use every bit of bandwidth and throughput that they are given.<\/p>","upvoteCount":1,"datePublished":"2014-12-24T16:12:51.000Z","url":"https://community.spiceworks.com/t/bandwidth-monitoring-tool/366285/12","author":{"@type":"Person","name":"phillipwindell","url":"https://community.spiceworks.com/u/phillipwindell"}},"suggestedAnswer":[{"@type":"Answer","text":"
Can anyone recommend an intuitive network monitoring tool? I mainly want to capture what devices are streaming audio and video on our network.<\/p>\n
What firewall are you running?<\/p>","upvoteCount":0,"datePublished":"2014-12-22T16:17:54.000Z","url":"https://community.spiceworks.com/t/bandwidth-monitoring-tool/366285/2","author":{"@type":"Person","name":"steve4970","url":"https://community.spiceworks.com/u/steve4970"}},{"@type":"Answer","text":"
