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How Network Traffic Flows And Why System Administrators Care

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finn pierson
How Network Traffic Flows And Why System Administrators Care

 

Network traffic comes in a variety of different forms. Most system administrators that are trying to prevent hacks will pay attention to the network traffic. This is going to be the sign of any type of irregular activity that could bring a network to a halt.

 

Denial of Service

 

There is one type of heavy network traffic attack that is used by hackers to bring a network to a standstill. This is the Denial of Service attack. Heavy traffic comes to a network and it gets so great that it can shut the network down. This is what network administrators want to avoid. This is why a large majority of people that are in network operations use network monitoring software to track packets.



Network Layers

 

Network traffic comes in layers. In the OSI model there are 7 different layers where data is transformed in a number of different forms. This data is encapsulated, stripped and moved from one layer of the OSI model to another. People that are in the networking environments are familiar with the way that traffic is moving on the network. When the traffic is flowing from routers and switches there is no way to see it, but there are network analyzers that provide greater network visibility. It becomes easier to see how the traffic is moving when the right software is in place.

 

Network Monitoring

 

The network becomes much easier to learn when people utilize programs like Wireshark to analyze the data. There are network applications that show how fast data is traveling. It can show what data is being downloaded and uploaded on the network. All of this is a part of network security and data analysis. When people have a better idea of network traffic they know how to pay attention to the bottlenecks in the network. They can find the culprits that are slowing down traffic and work on getting things back to normal.

 

Bandwidth

 

It is difficult to talk about network traffic without talking about bandwidth. This plays a big part in the speed in which the net worth is able to transmit traffic. A company or a home that has limited bandwidth will find that data is traveling at a much slower speed. This makes it harder to get work done. Productivity can come to a standstill when bandwidth is less than desirable. The companies that have high bandwidth for their network devices are not going to see the same network latency issues that other companies may experience.

 

Traffic Overload

 

Web traffic is also something that is monitored heavily on the web. A lot of website developers that have created websites are typically getting hosting sites that will allow many sessions. When a site is too popular, however, it is very possible that the network traffic can overload and crash a website. The host may not be able to process so many sessions to access the website at the same time.

 

A large majority of companies that provide hosting services promise 99.9 percent uptime. There is always a chance, however, that web traffic can be so great that it causes a website to crash.

 

Network traffic needs to be monitored. There has to be some type of way to balance the load. Many network administrators will acquire load balancing applications and hardware to balance the load of a network as it grows. 

 

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