If you’re the manager of an IT department, or heading up the operations team within your company, then being able to monitor your bandwidth is tantamount to your businesses success. It’s a way that you can establish what is being used, and only pay for what you need – saving you a sizable amount in the process.
However, it allows you to achieve more, because you can also monitor what services are using the most bandwidth. This will allow you to see what services you are using the most, and whether these can be cut back accordingly, depending your circumstances and requirements.
Sometimes however, problems do arise. For example, when you go to check what services are using the most bandwidth, if these are Content Delivery Networks (CDNs), then the process could be a little bit more difficult. CDNs are providers of content which can be downloaded or streamed instantly. They help to achieve a great experience for the end user, fuelling our need for instant content that is downloaded or streamed quickly and effectively. However, they can be a bit of a headache if you’re trying to monitor what is being downloaded and from where.
Why? Well, because CDNs host the source data within multiple copies found in lots of different locations. When you go to download the data, what happens with CDNs is that you are in fact directed to your nearest copy, just to make things a lot quicker. As you do, your available bandwidth capacity increases because you’re not dependent on the one server. This makes it harder to track visibility, but this shouldn’t deter anyone, because where there’s a will there’s a way. Continue reading »