By the time a network manager at a Midwestern U.S. non-profit organization called us for help, his 5 year-old wireless infrastructure was buckling under BYOD. Employees trying to work during lunch were complaining that their applications were slowing or even failing to operate.
He suspected the people who were trying to work were being affected by others listening to Pandora or watching YouTube from their personal devices while having lunch. But he just didn’t the ability have to confirm it. If he couldn’t control the use of wireless bandwidth he’d have to start paying his ISP a lot more money just to keep up.
An Ipswitch sales engineer listened to his story and suggested WhatsUp Gold to monitor his network, and Flow Monitor to analyze and manage network traffic and bandwidth utilization. Less than a day after downloading the products, a sysadmin on the network manager’s team shared a graph that showed midday spikes in wireless bandwidth consumption.
The sysadmin had used WhatsUp Gold to create and enforce BYOD and wireless network policies. The product’s wireless bandwidth consumption monitor automatically alerted her if usage exceeded a certain threshold. Once alerted, it only took a few minutes to determine who was eating both their lunch and wireless bandwidth.
Later that afternoon the two reviewed an Ipswitch log manager tool to access activity during lunchtime. It showed not only identified the worst offenders, but also their wireless bandwidth-hungry sites. A quiet word with the music and video fans reduced the spikes substantially. An email to all employees that covered the organization’s wireless bandwidth policy further smoothed out the midday data crush and nixed the need to write a bigger check to the ISP.