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Getting Started with the Bandwidth Monitor

1. Launch the program.
If you are running the application for the first time, you will see the application's main window "10-Strike Bandwidth Monitor" and the Network Scanning Wizard window.

By following the Wizard instructions, you can find hosts on your network quickly and easily and add them to the monitoring list.

The Wizard utilizes two methods of searching hosts on the network:

Scanning the IP address range

This method allows you to spot the maximum number of devices. It features the following advantages:

• High scanning speed (with optimal* scanning parameters and network settings).
• Device type recognition: printers (network and local), switches, hubs, servers, database servers, routers, WiFi access points, etc.
• Combination of several efficient network hardware search methods (ICMP ping, scanning series of TCP ports, ARP requests).
• Retrieving data from hardware via SNMP.
• Automatic additional information retrieving on found hosts (IP and MAC addresses, NIC manufacturer, DNS name, OS type, connected printers, descriptions).

If your network is rather large, this scanning method is recommended.

* - The perfect choice of search parameters depends on your network configuration, availability and functioning of the necessary protocols. In particular, to detect hosts in a local area network with bandwidth of 100 Mbps and higher, sufficient will be two ping packets and a 100-500 ms response. In the case with TCP ports, it is worth noticing that the greater number of ports you specify on the list, the longer the application will search for hosts in the network. The best way to go around this is to set 2-3 most common ports through which the application can find Windows stations and servers; those include 139, 21 and 80th (NetBIOS, FTP, HTTP). Keep in mind that in the OS Window XP and newer, there is a limitation (delay) of several TCP ports scanning that running simultaneously.

Searching for network printers is a different story. This procedure takes quite a bit of time, and therefore it should not be run if you are SURE that there are no such printers in your network. Otherwise, you would have to wait for the completion of that procedure. The completion will be indicated by the appearance of the network scanning progress bar in the network scanning wizard window. The reason why the procedure is so slow is because it searches for network printers BEFORE launching the primary scanning procedure (which is performed with a large number of threads running simultaneously, unlike with searching for printers). This is also true for obtaining the extra information on hosts through NetBIOS.

If the NetBIOS protocol is disabled on your network, no such information can be retrieved, and the application will spend quite a bit of time on that attempt (hence the feeling that the application is "frozen").

Searching for devices with SNMP is done in the multithreaded mode. However, if you specify a large number of possible community string values, that will also slow down the scanning process.

Hence, if you have configured the scanning parameters, and the application is scanning too slow or, even worse, completely "frozen" - go ahead and disable some of those scanning options (first, disable the network printer search and then disable obtaining additional information through NetBIOS) and try launching the scanning process again.

Importing from Network Neighborhood

This method works somewhat faster than the other one; however, not all devices are guaranteed to be found (only computers and some servers).

You can find more details on the scanning process in the Creating the list of network hosts topic.

 

If the Wizard was unable to find all hosts, you can add the missing ones to the monitoring list manually.

You can organize the found hosts into groups by creating those and then dragging the hosts into them using the mouse.

2. Add sensors to the found hosts.
Each host can have any number of network interfaces. One sensor can monitor the traffic which only runs through one network interface. Create the necessary number of bandwidth monitoring sensors using the Sensor Parameters Wizard.

3. Use the Context and Main menus, Toolbar buttons for accessing the application functions.
All the application functions are accessible through the context menu, toolbar, main menu and will be described further on.

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