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

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While organizations want to take control of their telemetry, building telemetry pipelines from scratch can be a very daunting, complicated task, even when leveraging open-source standards like OpenTelemetry. It requires specialized knowledge across distributed systems, data engineering, and security. This fragmented approach across systems causes higher operational costs; it puts a strain on resources and reduces efficiency as teams have to work with different interfaces and processes ...

The Corporate Network Is Fading - Here's What Replaces It

For decades, enterprise networks were designed around a simple assumption: work happened inside the office. Applications lived in centralized data centers, employees connected through internal infrastructure, and security focused on protecting the perimeter that surrounded everything ... But the way organizations operate today bears little resemblance to that environment. Cloud platforms host critical applications, employees connect from homes and airports as often as they do from offices, and partners collaborate through shared systems that exist far beyond corporate walls. In short, the corporate network no longer resembles the environment it was designed to protect ...

IT Leaders Must Establish a Network Data Architecture Practice

As an analyst who researches how IT organizations design, build, and operate their networks, I find that network data is a constant source of pain. Network teams struggle with data quality, fragmentation, authority, access, and trust. And these issues undermine everything they try to do. Here are the numbers: Only 45% of network teams are completely confident in the accuracy of their network source of truth, which documents the intent of their network ...

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TLS Certificate Expiration Is Becoming an Observability Problem

Certificate expiration is the rare outage you can see coming. Every TLS certificate carries the date it stops working, so the moment it will begin breaking connections is knowable in advance. That's what makes an expired certificate such a frustrating way to lose a service. What's changing now is how often that date comes around ...

Enterprise Cloud Observability: Choosing the Right Starting Point

Enterprises operate different combinations of workloads across cloud, hybrid and multicloud environments. For business-critical workloads, teams need to consider monitoring and observability early so they can detect health issues, investigate failures, and understand operational impact. Organizations place workloads on cloud platforms based on a combination of technical requirements, economics, existing dependencies, organizational standards, and business priorities. Their monitoring priorities therefore depend on what they operate and where those systems run. Those priorities will not look the same for every organization ...

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Top-performing businesses prioritize data-driven decision making, enabling leaders to move from intuition and gut feel towards evidence-based judgment. But that judgment is only sound when the data underpinning decisions is accurate. With incident management, data accuracy is particularly important. Long-term revenue, customer trust, and operational stability depend on high-quality data that enables teams to quickly identify and address the root cause of major incidents. Against this backdrop, governance becomes a critical endeavor to ensure the right data drives the right action ...

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Most production autonomous agents do not run in a vacuum. They run inside cloud infrastructure: virtual machines, containers, pods, managed clusters or private servers. That is where most operations teams start monitoring. Is the VM alive? Is the container running? Did the pod restart? Is memory stable? Is CPU too high? Did the health check pass? Those signals are useful. They tell you whether the shell around the agent is alive. They do not tell you whether the agent inside is actually operational ...