Colasoft Blog

To football fans, today is a big day! FIFA World Cup opens today, Friday, June 11, 2010. They will spend the nights with the TV and bears. But our network admins will be drove crazy too. Why? The World Cup brings us great joys as well as certain network problems. Some of the crazy fans will watch or replay the competitions online at work. In these days, you will find your network traffic grows dramatically. I don’t want to be mean with the big fans, but we still have to do our work to maintain the network goes smoothly. How can we figure who is watching World Cup online at workplace? With Capsa network analyzer at hand, that would be so easy for you to monitor network, and prevent the network problems that World Cup may bring to your LAN.

Well, first we should make a list of football fans’ names and inform them not to watch videos online. And then we will keep an eye on our network utilization. When the utilization graph is high pitch, we know someone is disobeying the rules. Then we can check out who is consuming the bandwidth in the IP Endpoint tab.

But utilization cannot tell everything. We still need to spend a little seconds to check the protocols used in the network (Protocol tab). Special attention should be paid to protocols like P2P, RSTP and even HTTP. Online video takes a big portion of bandwidth so that we can easily find them out in the Protocol tab. The following figure shows that the HTTP traffic is abnormal which takes too much traffic.

When a suspicious protocol spotted, we should concentrate on it and check which IP address is generating the traffic in the IP Endpoint tab (figure below).

Then we could take a further step to prove our analysis. We can check out their conversations (IP Conversation tab), communication matrix (Matrix tab), and even we can go down to their original traffic packets (Packet tab).

With the above tips, I’m sure you can guarantee a healthy network during the special World Cup time.