Handling March Madness: 8 Things IT Teams Need to Do

Sai Sundhar
Learn more about ManageEngine

Are you sponsoring the NCAA basketball tournament in March? Well, maybe not directly. But you might be doing just that if your employees stream it on the company's network through their desktops and, lately, their mobile devices as well. The result? Traffic spikes and strangled bandwidth.

Traffic spikes in IT networks are a common sight during March Madness. Users have hundreds of live streaming options and apps dedicated to the tournament. The added network traffic, of course, can lead to insufficient bandwidth and network delays for your business-critical applications and create an IT nightmare.

Here are eight things that IT teams can do to ensure that the network is well guarded and productivity remains untouched during March Madness:

1. Monitor bandwidth usage continuously

Real-time views of bandwidth usage can pinpoint the instant at which a spike occurs. This information can help identify the bandwidth spent in streaming games and verify the impact on applications.

2. Set alarms based on thresholds

Configuring a usage threshold on certain ports can help control bandwidth usage on those ports. When bandwidth usage on a specific port exceeds the configured threshold, setting up an alert can help in controlling usage at that port. This will ensure that applications on that port will remain unaffected and bandwidth is available for business-critical applications.

3. Monitor device-wise traffic

Viewing network devices at one glance based on device traffic can help identify traffic-guzzling devices. This will help the IT team troubleshoot and ensure continuous network uptime.

4. Segment the network into departments and monitor traffic

Viewing department-wise bandwidth usage across the organization helps identify departments that stream NCAA-based sites and contribute to bandwidth strangling. You can then limit bandwidth usage depending on the amount of resources needed to run productive applications and control bandwidth wastage.

5. Set the right QoS policies

Implementing the right QoS policies can help in prioritizing business-centric applications, such as CRM and corporate email, over bandwidth-consuming yet unproductive applications, such as Skype, YouTube, etc. This will ensure enough bandwidth for business-critical applications.

6. Monitor dropped traffic

Depending on the QoS policy of your organization, some traffic might get dropped. It's important to monitor this traffic because it could be business-critical traffic. Therefore, IT teams must have some visibility into traffic based on QoS drops.

7. Monitor top applications

Viewing the applications running on your network is important to ensure that your network is being productively used. Real-time visibility into these applications at a given point in time and traffic statistics based on application-wise usage improve control.

8. Measure SLA levels

The impact of insufficient bandwidth means various things: VoIP calls get jittery or video calls have a low quality score. Therefore, measuring service levels for voice, data and video is important in verifying whether business-critical tools remain unaffected.

These are some preemptive measures that IT teams can adopt to minimize the impact of March Madness on networks and organizational productivity.

Sai Sundhar is marketing analyst on the NetFlow Analyzer team at ManageEngine.

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Handling March Madness: 8 Things IT Teams Need to Do

Sai Sundhar
Learn more about ManageEngine

Are you sponsoring the NCAA basketball tournament in March? Well, maybe not directly. But you might be doing just that if your employees stream it on the company's network through their desktops and, lately, their mobile devices as well. The result? Traffic spikes and strangled bandwidth.

Traffic spikes in IT networks are a common sight during March Madness. Users have hundreds of live streaming options and apps dedicated to the tournament. The added network traffic, of course, can lead to insufficient bandwidth and network delays for your business-critical applications and create an IT nightmare.

Here are eight things that IT teams can do to ensure that the network is well guarded and productivity remains untouched during March Madness:

1. Monitor bandwidth usage continuously

Real-time views of bandwidth usage can pinpoint the instant at which a spike occurs. This information can help identify the bandwidth spent in streaming games and verify the impact on applications.

2. Set alarms based on thresholds

Configuring a usage threshold on certain ports can help control bandwidth usage on those ports. When bandwidth usage on a specific port exceeds the configured threshold, setting up an alert can help in controlling usage at that port. This will ensure that applications on that port will remain unaffected and bandwidth is available for business-critical applications.

3. Monitor device-wise traffic

Viewing network devices at one glance based on device traffic can help identify traffic-guzzling devices. This will help the IT team troubleshoot and ensure continuous network uptime.

4. Segment the network into departments and monitor traffic

Viewing department-wise bandwidth usage across the organization helps identify departments that stream NCAA-based sites and contribute to bandwidth strangling. You can then limit bandwidth usage depending on the amount of resources needed to run productive applications and control bandwidth wastage.

5. Set the right QoS policies

Implementing the right QoS policies can help in prioritizing business-centric applications, such as CRM and corporate email, over bandwidth-consuming yet unproductive applications, such as Skype, YouTube, etc. This will ensure enough bandwidth for business-critical applications.

6. Monitor dropped traffic

Depending on the QoS policy of your organization, some traffic might get dropped. It's important to monitor this traffic because it could be business-critical traffic. Therefore, IT teams must have some visibility into traffic based on QoS drops.

7. Monitor top applications

Viewing the applications running on your network is important to ensure that your network is being productively used. Real-time visibility into these applications at a given point in time and traffic statistics based on application-wise usage improve control.

8. Measure SLA levels

The impact of insufficient bandwidth means various things: VoIP calls get jittery or video calls have a low quality score. Therefore, measuring service levels for voice, data and video is important in verifying whether business-critical tools remain unaffected.

These are some preemptive measures that IT teams can adopt to minimize the impact of March Madness on networks and organizational productivity.

Sai Sundhar is marketing analyst on the NetFlow Analyzer team at ManageEngine.

Related Links

Hot Topics

Related Vendors

The Latest

Clearing the Path to AI: Why Vendor Consolidation Matters Now

Enterprises are under pressure to scale AI quickly. Yet despite considerable investment, adoption continues to stall. One of the most overlooked reasons is vendor sprawl ... In reality, no organization deliberately sets out to create sprawling vendor ecosystems. More often, complexity accumulates over time through well-intentioned initiatives, such as enterprise-wide digital transformation efforts, point solutions, or decentralized sourcing strategies ...

Cold Data, Hot Problem: Why AI Is Rewriting Enterprise Storage Strategy

Nearly every conversation about AI eventually circles back to compute. GPUs dominate the headlines while cloud platforms compete for workloads and model benchmarks drive investment decisions. But underneath that noise, a quieter infrastructure challenge is taking shape. The real bottleneck in enterprise AI is not processing power, it is the ability to store, manage and retrieve the relentless volumes of data that AI systems generate, consume and multiply ...

Observability at a Crossroads: AI, Economics, Complexity and the Enduring Power of Open Source

The 2026 Observability Survey from Grafana Labs paints a vivid picture of an industry maturing fast, where AI is welcomed with careful conditions, SaaS economics are reshaping spending decisions, complexity remains a defining challenge, and open standards continue to underpin it all ...

Explainability Is the New Battleground in AI-Powered Observability

The observability industry has an evolving relationship with AI. We're not skeptics, but it's clear that trust in AI must be earned ... In Grafana Labs' annual Observability Survey, 92% said they see real value in AI surfacing anomalies before they cause downtime. Another 91% endorsed AI for forecasting and root cause analysis. So while the demand is there, customers need it to be trustworthy, as the survey also found that the practitioners most enthusiastic about AI are also the most insistent on explainability ...

Empowering the Human Side of the Autonomous IT Age

In the modern enterprise, the conversation around AI has moved past skepticism toward a stage of active adoption. According to our 2026 State of IT Trends Report: The Human Side of Autonomous AI, nearly 90% of IT professionals view AI as a net positive, and this optimism is well-founded. We are seeing agentic AI move beyond simple automation to actively streamlining complex data insights and eliminating the manual toil that has long hindered innovation. However, as we integrate these autonomous agents into our ecosystems, the fundamental DNA of the IT role is evolving ...

AI Scale Is Outpacing Infrastructure - and IT Leaders Are Running Out of Time

AI workloads require an enormous amount of computing power ... What's also becoming abundantly clear is just how quickly AI's computing needs are leading to enterprise systems failure. According to Cockroach Labs' State of AI Infrastructure 2026 report, enterprise systems are much closer to failure than their organizations realize. The report ... suggests AI scale could cause widespread failures in as little as one year — making it a clear risk for business performance and reliability.

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The quietest week your engineering team has ever had might also be its best. No alarms going off. No escalations. No frantic Teams or Slack threads at 2 a.m. Everything humming along exactly as it should. And somewhere in a leadership meeting, someone looks at the metrics dashboard, sees a flat line of incidents and says: "Seems like things are pretty calm over there. Do we really need all those people?" ... I've spent many years in engineering, and this pattern keeps repeating ...

Observability Costs Rising Faster Than Value

The gap is widening between what teams spend on observability tools and the value they receive amid surging data volumes and budget pressures, according to The Breaking Point for Observability Leaders, a report from Imply ...

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If your best engineers spend their days sorting tickets and resetting access, you are wasting talent. New global data shows that employees in the IT sector rank among the least motivated across industries. They're under a lot of pressure from many angles. Pressure to upskill and uncertainty around what agentic AI means for job security is creating anxiety. Meanwhile, these roles often function like an on-call job and require many repetitive tasks ...