Introduction: About the Network Bandwidth Monitoring Program

10-Strike Bandwidth Monitor allows you to monitor the bandwidth and the traffic volume which is transmitted through computers, servers, printers and other devices connected to your local area network or the Internet. The application collects data on the inbound and outbound traffic utilized and visualizes the bandwidth dynamically in the real time. If the critical limits of utilized traffic volume are reached, the application will respond to these events in different ways - from sending the SMS and e-mail through rebooting a computer or a service. The application offers you a lot of possibilities of forming reports and viewing statistics.

The bandwidth monitoring can be performed over the SNMP protocol, WMI, and remote agents. The remote agent is a service that gathers traffic data locally and then sends it over the TCP protocol to the main application upon request (client-server). You can install remote agents on remote computers if it is impossible to use WMI or SNMP (Learn more about the remote agents...).

The application operates in the 24/7 mode and it is fully functional in all versions of Windows, starting from Windows 2000.

General Functions:

The program scans a local area network, automatically retrieves the list of available hosts, generates a hierarchical monitoring list, and allows you to add and configure sensors for each host (one sensor represents and monitors one network interface). The application scans the sensors periodically and retrieves volume of traffic which transmits through them. The program supports the following types of sensors for gathering the inbound and outbound traffic data:

• SNMP sensor
• WMI sensor
• Remote agent
• Packet sniffer

The application can respond to events (e.g. exceeding the critical limits of bandwidth, traffic volume, and errors occurred on a network interface) in several ways:

• Displaying a message on the screen
• Sending a message via e-mail
• Sending an SMS message
• Playing a sound alarm
• Launching an application with parameters
• Adding a record to the program log file
• Adding a record to Windows Event Log
• Restarting / Stopping / Starting a service
• Rebooting / Turning off / Turning on a computer
• Executing VB or JS script

Features and Advantages:

• A few alternative ways of obtaining the traffic statistics from the remote hosts: SNMP, WMI, and remote agents.
  
• Counting traffic by different network protocols. Counting traffic for a local network and the Internet independently (using the packet sniffing).
  
• Displaying bandwidth speed dynamically on diagrams.
  
• The application's architecture constitutes a two-module system: Server and Client. The Server is implemented as a Windows service and can run for a long time without restarting or operator's intervention. It polls all the configured traffic sensors, gathers all the stats and stores the data in the internal database. This means that the monitoring computer does not have to be logged on. This can be a dedicated server for bandwidth monitoring or some other existing server. The Server service implements all the monitoring functions, performs notifications (except displaying messages on the screen). The Client application (the GUI program you operate with) displays monitoring results, draws statistic diagrams, and allows you to configure the program settings and add monitoring alerts.
  
• Multithreaded traffic sensor monitoring mechanism. The number of threads running simultaneously can be configured.
  
• A few alternative ways of notifying the administrator when alerts arise (under the particular conditions). The notification methods include: displaying a message, sending e-mail, SMS, recording to program and Windows logs, managing services, rebooting computers, shutting computers down and turning them on, executing user applications with parameters or scripts, playing a sound alarm.
  
• Real-time diagrams and statistics reports.
  
• Automatic generation of the host list to be monitored using the quick multithreaded scanning Wizard according to specified IP addresses ranges. A few methods of searching of network devices can be used: the ICMP pinging, scanning the list of TCP ports, the ARP pinging. The program used the original intellectual algorithm of detecting types of the found network devices.