Many factors affect the continued growth of network traffic – corporate initiatives like VoIP, new application implementations such as an ERP, and even recreational usage like streaming radio or video. These business changes, along with technology innovation, have led to an explosion of new, bandwidth-intensive applications and an increased probability of network congestion – a significant risk to business processes. Without information on what applications are consuming bandwidth corporations are forced to upgrade to higher and higher speed networks.

Business-Based Network Capacity Planning with the NetScout Solution 
With the NetScout Performance Management Solution you can report on and analyze growth trends and usage patterns in order to make decisions about optimizing bandwidth, rescheduling activities, reallocating traffic, or even creating use policies. In addition to enterprise-wide baselines and forecasts, nGenius goes beyond basic utilization to identify the applications consume bandwidth. This provides the justification for capacity planning and allows you to keep your budget in check.

• Proactively combat network congestion by reporting on bandwidth growth and forecasting capacity shortfalls
• Gain quantifiable business justification by understanding and reporting on which applications consume your network resources in order to postpone upgrades and justify growth & policy decisions
• Tune traffic to optimize resources by identifying over- and under-utilized (physical and logical) segments so you can redistribute load and balance costs
• Baseline current traffic patterns to ensure new applications can be supported during peak activity periods
• Plan enterprise-wide network capacity with a unified performance management solution that will support all data sources and areas of your network from the core to access layers, including higher speed networks such as 10 Gigabit Ethernet and OC-12 ATM
• Curtail network misuse for better network utilization by identifying and reporting on non-business uses of the network

Learn how to use NetFlow data for network capacity planning.