LAN-to-WAN Traffic and Performance Monitoring and Analysis

Monitoring the traffic that flows through the LAN-to-WAN Domain can be a demanding task, but it is one that is a vital part of ensuring your environment’s security. A secure ­network is one that provides smooth operation and allows only authorized traffic. If any part of your network were to be down even for a small period of time, productivity within your organization would decline. In the case of critical business functions, network ­problems could cause service interruptions and could result in noncompliance. To be ­proactive, it is important to monitor how traffic moves throughout the network and to verify that your network is meeting your organization’s security goals.

Traffic monitoring and analysis is the process of capturing network traffic and examining it to determine how users and applications are using your network. The two main monitoring techniques are network device based and nondevice based. Network devices, especially routers and gateways, often include monitoring functionality you can use to keep track of your network’s health. Nondevice techniques require that you add hardware or software to capture traffic and analyze it. Any computer in the LAN-to-WAN Domain can act as a traffic-capture device.

After you capture traffic, your analysis software can examine it in real time or save it to a file for later analysis. Monitoring and analyzing network traffic in the LAN-to-WAN Domain is very similar to monitoring and analyzing traffic in the LAN Domain. The goal is to detect problems before they become critical. Your efforts should focus on identifying degrading performance that might affect data availability or traffic that might indicate attack activities.