Network Traffic Analysis Software collects, monitors, and analyzes the data flowing over the network and provides real-time actionable data on network traffic, applications, and bandwidth consumption. Network Traffic Analysis Software helps a network administrator to examine and optimize network infrastructure, network capacity planning, and identify and detect network security threats. The tool is available in both standalone and bundled form, which is being majorly used by enterprises and service providers.

COMPETITIVE LEADERSHIP MAPPING TERMINOLOGY

Based on the vendors’ performance in each criterion, they are placed in 4 categories: visionary leaders, innovators, emerging companies, and dynamic differentiators. The top 25 vendors have been evaluated: Andrisoft, CA Technologies, Cisco Systems, Colasoft, Flowmon Networks, Genie Networks, HelpSystems, HPE, InMon Corp., Ipswitch, Kentik, LogicMonitor, ManageEngine, Nagios, NEC Corporation, NetFlow Auditor, NETSCOUT SYSTEMS, NetVizura (Soneco), Nokia, ntop, Opmantek, Opsview, Paessler, Plixer, and SolarWinds.

VISIONARY LEADERS

Vendors in Network Traffic Analysis Software who fall in this category receive high scores for most of the evaluation criteria and are known as visionary leaders. They have an established product portfolio and a very strong market presence. They also have strong business strategies. Visionary leaders of the Network Traffic Analysis Software market are Cisco Systems, Paessler, SolarWinds, ManageEngine, HelpSystems, Flowmon Networks, and NETSCOUT SYSTEMS.

DYNAMIC DIFFERENTIATORS

Dynamic differentiators are established vendors with very strong business strategies. However, they have scored low in product portfolio. They focus on a specific type of technology related to the product. CA Technologies, HPE, NEC Corporation, Nokia, and Opmantek are dynamic differentiators of the Network Traffic Analysis Software market.

INNOVATORS

Innovators demonstrate substantial product innovations as compared with their competitors. They have a strong focused product portfolio. However, they do not have very strong growth strategies. Plixer, NetFlow Auditor, Colasoft, Genie Networks, Nagios, and Ipswitch fall into this category.

EMERGING COMPANIES

Emerging companies have niche product offerings and are starting to gain their positions in the market. They do not have very strong business strategies as compared with other established vendors. They might be new entrants in the market and require some more time before gaining significant traction. Emerging companies of the Network Traffic Analysis Software market are LogicMonitor, Kentik, Opsview, InMon Corp., Andrisoft, ntop, and NetVizura (Soneco)

The enterprise network involves hundreds of network devices that include workstations, switches, routers, hubs, servers, virtual machines, firewalls, and various other network-related appliances. To manage and maintain these devices, the network admin needs customized network traffic analysis and monitoring tools. These tools deliver insights into network traffic, bandwidth consumption, business applications, and protocol analysis. In addition to this, the tools help detects the problems related to security in the networks, which in turn helps the network admins prevent the network infrastructure from a network failure and outage. Consequently, the network traffic analyzer tools help organizations in monitoring the network traffic, bandwidth consumption, and congestion in the network. The tools also identify breaches, detect and mitigate security attacks, and make a network planning for the future.

Different methods are used to monitor and analyze the network traffic, namely, SNMP, Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI), flow technologies, and packet capture or packet sniffing. The common network flow protocol includes NetFlow, Juniper Flow (J-Flow), Sampled Flow (sFlow) and Internet Protocol Flow Information Export (IPFIX), which are mostly used for analyzing the network traffic over the network infrastructure.

NETWORK TRAFFIC

Network traffic refers to monitoring the network traffic passing over the network. The network traffic module uses NetFlow, sFlow, J-Flow, and IPFIX flow-based technologies to collect the network data flow over the network. Network admins can view the network statistics in the form of a graph over the web browser. Furthermore, they can monitor and device the traffic, the end-user traffic, and custom traffic using the NetFlow analyzer or any other flow-based method. Traffic information is available per subnets, hosts, end-to-end conversations, and ports. In addition to that, the tool can monitor the north-south and east-west traffic flowing over the network.

BANDWIDTH MONITORING

In networking, bandwidth refers to the rate of information flow per second over the network. Bandwidth monitoring is a process of computing the bandwidth available on the network systems. It gives statistics about the consumption of the bandwidth over the network. Bandwidth monitoring also helps the network admin in identifying the bandwidth consumption of applications, devices, and protocols, so that they can manage the network bandwidth accordingly. NetFlow, sFlow, J-Flow, WMI, and SNMP methods have been used since the last few decades to measure the bandwidth usage over the network.

APPLICATION MONITORING

Several business applications or software are run on network devices to perform business functions. Enterprises are keen to monitor these applications to gain the context of information flow around the network. The network traffic analyzer tool can monitor the standard software and web applications that include databases, mail servers, firewalls, virtual applications, and other cloud-based applications. Application monitoring helps the network admin in smoothly running the business applications, managing the usage of the applications, and reducing the downtime of the network by examining suspicious activities on the network.

NETWORK CAPACITY PLANNING

Network capacity planning helps businesses in evaluating future network requirements, based on the current, historical, and estimated network usage. Based on the available current and historical data, it gives a clear picture of the network infrastructure about its evolution in the future. Using the network traffic analyzer tool, the network capacity planning solution helps businesses in preparing for the future demands of the network. Network capacity planning benefits businesses by reducing the network downtime, upgrading the infrastructure, identifying bottlenecks, and lowering the operational costs.

NETWORK SECURITY

Enterprise network is majorly infected by malware, DDoS, threats, worms, botnet, and viruses across the globe. Businesses are witnessing these attacks on a daily basis. The network traffic analyzer tool is the best solution for enterprises to combat their network security. The tool works on flow-based technology to detect and mitigate the DoS attacks. In addition, it also provides in-depth visibility into the network by offering anomaly detection, advanced forensics, and the security analytics module. Enterprises, data centers, MSPs, ISPs, and cloud service providers have witnessed the improvement in their network security by deploying the network traffic analyzer tool.

Best Network Traffic Analysis Software

Comparing 25 vendors in Network Traffic Analysis Software across 115 criteria.
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2.4 Online
Netflow Auditor is comprised of Standalone, Clustering and Hierarchical Collection; Threat Intelligence; Machine Learning-based Anomaly Detection and Automated Diagnostics; Application Mapping, Correlation and Flexible Templates; and Internet Protocol Address Management (IPAM) / Billing. Standalone, Clustering and Hierarchical Collection architecture options enable a cost-effective high compliance network traffic transaction logging with forensic analysis tools to perform data mining on any aspect of flow data from simple performance analytics to complex cyber-security profiling. Threat Intelligence based on global threat knowledge powers an advanced threat intelligence engine correlating, identifying and detailing communications with nefarious end-points in real-time that are known to be risky such as Ransomware, ToR, Botnets, Malware and illicit Peer-to-Peer (P2P) traffic. Machine Learning-based Anomaly Detection and Automated Diagnostics consists of a comprehensive IDS comprised of machine learning, detection and diagnostic engines that work together to find network behavior anomalies with automated problem-solving processes to pinpoint, mitigate and qualify the reason(s) for an anomaly. Netflow Auditor scales in architecture and licensing and is therefore suitable for enterprises of any size and is available for on-premises and cloud deployments. Multi-tenancy collection, portal and automated reporting, provides the ability to run as a SaaS service and suits MSPs and ISP’s who are seeking to deliver advanced threat Intelligence and network analytics. Granular journaling is well suited to fulfilling Internet Data Retention Compliance by governments and organizations and tracking IoT communications. Unique privacy award winning methods allow tuning and tagging of network traffic information enabling it to moderate both privacy concerns of end-users and compliance requirements balancing accounting and accountability.
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 Network Traffic Analysis Software offered by NETSCOUT is powered by its proprietary Adaptive Service Intelligence (ASI) technology. ASI is its next-generation network traffic analysis software. The solution powered by ASI continuously monitors customer’s service delivery environment to provide deep insight into network-based security threats and identify network performance issues. The company’s ASI technologybased software analytics gathers and converts real-time terabytes of network traffic data into high actionable information. This valuable information helps customers to manage applications, optimize network performance, improve network security, and helps end-users gain insight. NETSCOUT integrates it solutions with solutions of other companies such as Cisco Systems, Citrix Systems, Dell, IBM, HP, and VMWare
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Cisco NAM is available in various versions for end-users, namely, NAM Software 4.2, Prime NAM Software 5.0, prime NAM Software 5.1, Prime NAM Software 6.0, Prime NAM Software 6.1, and Prime NAM Software 6.2. Cisco delivers product offerings that are aimed to optimize network resource, security, and simplify the network infrastructure of services providers, data center providers, and enterprises. Cisco Systems Inc also offers Virtual NPM with which customers can monitor and analyze network systems at anytime and anywhere. Cisco has grabbed a pole position in the network traffic analysis software market by leveraging its Research and Development (R&D) capabilities and merging them with the offerings of the recently acquired companies. Cisco Stealthwatch provides a high level of security against advanced network threats. Stealthwatch captures real-time network data from devices, applications, and users to protect against threats, DDoS, and malware. This solution helps enterprises to mitigate the network security attacks by troubleshooting network system. It also helps enterprises to solve various issues related to compliance, data center security, cloud security, and security intelligence. Cisco also offers professional services including deployment of the solution, health monitoring of devices, proxy integration, and Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) integration. Cisco’s customers include Westinghouse, Asiacell, Deloitte, Viacom, and Experian.
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The company offers enterprise edition network management products, which consist integrated component, web servers, and databases. These enterprise-class network management products are designed to work together. SolarWinds also helps network administrators to purchase and deploy individual products as per their requirements. Network Performance Monitor, SolarWinds’ flagship product, is a server-based performance and fault management platform and is designed to lower the network downtime. NetFlow Traffic Analyzer is a network traffic analyzer and bandwidth monitoring software. NetFlow Traffic Analyzer gathers data from various network devices using Cisco Systems’ NetFlow protocol and other related protocols. The data provides an extensive view of the network, which enables network administrators to know which end-users, applications, and protocols are consuming more bandwidth. NetFlow Traffic Analyzer offers capabilities, such as network traffic analysis, bandwidth monitoring, performance analysis dashboard, customizable network traffic reports, Wireless Local Area Network (LAN) Controller (WLC) traffic monitoring, and Next Generation Network-Based Application Recognition (NBAR2) advanced application recognition. SolarWinds’ network and systems management software are built on Orion platform. The cloud-based products of SolarWinds are used to manage and monitor application infrastructure in the cloud as well as in the onpremises environment.
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Flowmon's network traffic analysis software identifies various types of service outages and the misconfiguration of the network, unauthorised access to the network, multicast traffic, violations in the policies leading to security issues, the workstations which are getting impacted by the network and the unauthorised activity in the data network and many more solutions. Flowmon provides a very uniques feature of auditing the network to detect anomalies and to monitor the performance of the network. This feature is used by both - the technical team and the top management to rectify the errors and increase the efficiency of the system
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ManageEngine's Network Traffic Analysis Software leverages the flow technologies for network traffic and bandwidth analysis. NetFlow provides the real-time information about network and bandwidth in graphical form to analyze and monitor network application, traffic, and bandwidth. It also provides network forensic, app centric monitoring, and network capacity planning tool. NetFlow effectively supports voice, data, and video traffic. It can monitor and analyze the network traffic from different devices such as Cisco, 3COM, HPE, Extreme, and Juniper. NetFlow analyzer is also available on the mobile app. Its major benefits include bandwidth reporting, network traffic, application performance, protocol monitoring, network security, network troubleshooting, network reports, and site-to-site traffic monitoring. NetFlow has been deployed by some major companies, such as Broadcom, DHL, FedEx, and IBM. For SMEs, ManageEngine delivers some free networking tools: ping tool, SNMP, Management Information Base (MIB) browser, windows health monitor, and syslog forwarder. ManageEngine supports customer enquiries via phone and mail. Furthermore, it also offers onsite training, classroom training, and online training for customers.
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Paessler AG produces a highly powerful network monitoring software, PRTG Network Monitor. It is agentless and monitors and classifies usage of bandwidth, collects statistics from a host like routers and servers.

There is an auto-discovery feature that scans predefined areas in the network. The software creates a list of devices from the collected data detailed information for which can be obtained by using several communication protocols.
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Intermapper, Intermapper Flows and Intermapper Remote Access by HelpSystems LLC provides network monitoring solution to the network administrators. These net admins can monitor the flow in the network from anywhere irrespective of place using the Intermapper remote access and they can track the network flows per user and devices in the network. The network flows are presented in the form of reports and real time charts displaying the potential threat from the DDoS attacks. Intermapper interfaces with Automate, our IT automation solution, for seamless self-healing.
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The indoor location software from NEC Corporation is designed with the technology that has used geomagnetism to identify the exact location of things inside the buildings. The software overcomes the drawbacks of the GPS satellite that hardly locates the steel frames and other materials. The technology identifies the geomagnetism characteristics for all the floors of the building based on the information on indoor location.
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2.7
IMC’s network traffic analyzer software provides real-time and historical report on application usage, bandwidth consumption, network visibility, intelligent traffic analysis, and application and protocol mapping. It supports NetFlow, sFlow, and Netstream flow technologies, and helps network managers to monitor and troubleshoot the entire network infrastructure. HPE assists end-users in implementation and deployment of network traffic analyzer solution along with support services that include remote and technical support services.
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It also helps network security professionals to combat against network security threats and malware by delivering contextual forensics information from available metadata. Plixer offers scalability and flexibility through its Scrutinizer network traffic analyzer solution for IoT, BYOD, and virtual machines environments to monitor unpredictable network and application traffic. Scrutinizer supports various flow technologies NetFlow, IPFIX, sFlow, J-Flow, and Netstream and it can be integrated with third-party network monitoring tools such as Cisco, Infoblox, SolarWinds, HPE, Ipswitch, Splunk, and Spiceworks. Plixer delivers its solutions to service providers and enterprises. Furthermore, the company assists end-users in implementing hardware and software solutions for support services.
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The insights about network traffic and bandwidth usage allow network managers to improve network infrastructure, services, and applications. In addition, WhatsUp Gold’s network traffic monitor solution assists in network traffic visibility, bandwidth capacity planning, and network troubleshooting. The network monitor analyzer supports various flow technologies, such as Cisco NetFlow, J-Flow, sFlow, and IPFIX. It also delivers alerts about network traffic, applications, bandwidth threshold, network protocols; and generates reports that help network administrator in analyzing the network. The company provides training, support, and technical services for enterprise customers. Ipswitch’s software and solutions are trusted by major firms, such as Citibank, AT&T, Ford, and Nestle.
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Network administrators can access all the network statistics via Web 2.0 Graphical User Interface (GUI). In addition, VitalSuite flow software collects all the network data from routers including NetFlow and sFlow records. These records provide information about network traffic and bandwidth consumption which helps network managers to understand the network infrastructure better. VitalSuite can be integrated with other network management systems. VitalSuite is used by SMEs, large enterprises, and service providers across the globe. Nokia provides support and training services for end-users including Nokia network online services, online customer services, and product information center. The company also offers implementation, maintenance, and managed services for customers.
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2.5
Versatile, adaptable, simple to execute and keep up NMIS is the Network Traffic Firewall Software that supports the activities of a huge number of associations around the world – making it one of the most broadly utilized open source Network Management Systems on the Earth today. NMIS screens the status and execution of an association's IT condition, aids recognizable proof and correction of issues, and gives significant data to IT divisions to design framework changes and speculation. Its extraordinary device demonstrating capacity takes into consideration speedy and simple expansion of new administration support for devices with no coding required.
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CA Network Flow Analysis is integrated with various CA tools, such as Application Delivery Analysis, Unified Communications Monitor, Performance Center, and many other CA technologies and third-party IT management tools. CA Network Flow Analysis is one of the key components in CA Technologies Application-Driven Network Performance Management (ANPM) solution. The company offers professional services, such as implementation, consulting, application management, education and support services, management services to both government and commercial customers. CA also offers post-sale services to assist in upgradation, migration, and resolve query 24/7, and create and provide self-help documentation. CA Technologies invested approximately 15% of its total annual revenues in R&D (March 2017). The company uses a business model where it offers customers a broad range of licensing choices, such as on-premises licensing, perpetual licensing, subscription licensing, and flexible licensing
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It also orchestrates network management tasks, such as network monitoring, network troubleshooting, application performance, and network provisioning that improves the operational efficiency of the network infrastructure. Furthermore, it collects the information about network traffic and bandwidth that allows network administrators to create an action plan for network management. It also generates traffic report and provides a detailed view about network traffic, application and bandwidth consumption. GenieATM has a range of features, such as traffic mining, DDoS detection and mitigation, traffic snapshot, network modelling, and anomaly detection. Moreover, the company offers support, professional services, and managed services for customers that include planning, deployment, implementation, training, and education services. GenieATM model is available in hardware as well as software solutions.
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The Network Traffic Analysis software from Nagios is a free, open-source computer software application that helps in monitoring networks, systems, and infrastructure. The product is designed to run on the Linux operating system and also works for monitoring devices running Windows, Linux, and Unix Operating Systems. The software Nagios performs periodic checks on critical parameters of network, application and server resources.
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It provides user-friendly dashboard to view all the network statistics. Capsa also offers VoIP analysis, alerts, task scheduler, Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) flow analysis, and network security solutions. Based on functionality and price, Capsa is available in 3 editions, namely, Capsa enterprise, Capsa professional, and Capsa free. Colasoft has an online store for end-users to purchase its network management solution. The company has an online support center wherein all the information about product installation, deployment, product updates, and training materials is available.
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The unique selling proposition (USP) of LogicMonitor is its comprehensive and automated approach to network monitoring. It provides real-time, round-the-clock monitoring of network traffic across virtual, cloud, and physical infrastructures. It collects and stores more than 500 metrics, including bandwidth utilization, latency, jitter, errors, discards, and application-level performance metrics. It also offers detailed analytics and alerts based on network performance, allowing businesses to proactively identify, troubleshoot, and resolve performance issues. With LogicMonitor’s unique network visibility, businesses gain insights into traffic trends, usage patterns, and security threats.
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Kentik Detect supports all data formats, such as NetFlow v5 and v9, sFlow, J-Flow, cflowd, RFlow, IPFIX, SNMP, and BGP routing data. Network team can store the network data into the Kentik Data Engine (KDE), a distributed column store database. Kentik Detect offers a high level of security against DDoS attacks. It has in-built anomaly detection functionality and supports various DDoS mitigation solutions via technology integration partnerships, including with A10 Networks and Radware. The customer can access the Kentik Detect service on a subscription basis. Furthermore, Kentik Detect is a cost-effective solution providing open API integration for queries and requires zero maintenance cost. The company helps enterprises and service providers enhance network infrastructure at a reduced cost, improve efficiency, increase revenues, and optimize business processes.
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Opsview Network Traffic Analysis Software is a system observing device that tracks network information, helping the user dissect performing devices, kill bottlenecks, and anticipate future issues. With the varied services such as Netflow Analytics, SNMP, Cisco/Juniper Monitoring, SSH/DNS/NTP and other network services, Network Analyzer is a complete solution for the network analysis and monitoring.
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InMon's variety of products provide different solutions for Network Analysis and Monitoring. Traffic Sentinel™ gives ongoing system perceivability to oversee huge complex systems. sFlowTrend™ is a free, graphical system and server observing instrument. sFlowTrend utilizes the famous sFlow® standard to produce ongoing presentations of the top clients and applications utilizing system transmission capacity. sFlowTrend-Pro™ is a completely highlighted system traffic observing item. sFlowTrend-Pro utilizes the well known sFlow® standard to produce ongoing presentations of the top clients and applications utilizing system transmission capacity. sFlowTrend-Pro additionally utilizes the expansions to the sFlow standard for checking physical and virtual server execution, to connection system, server, and application execution and give an end-end perspective on arranged framework execution.
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NetFlow Network Traffic Analysis Software is a simple software for net administrators to understand bandwidth utilization, traffic patterns, applications, potential threats in form of anomalies, by traffic monitoring using network devices, interfaces and subnets, traffic portions and end users. This empowers organizations to upgrade their systems and applications, plan arrange extension, spare time required for investigating and diagnostics and improve security which significantly brings down organization operational expenses and expanding system group efficiency.
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1.7
A network plus traffic monitoring software. Ntop surveys a computer network and to provide information on network usage. It has two modes- interactive and web. While in interactive it shows network status and in web, it acts as a network HTML dump.

It is based on pcapture and is written in a portable way which makes it possible to run on every Unix platform. The software is available for both Win32 and Unix platforms. It uses a system-independent interface, libpcap, for packet capture.

Newer versions of software have also been released like ntopng that are high-speed, web-based, and efficient.
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An enterprise grade software - Andrisoft Wanguard delivers its solutions to NOC, IT and security firms who need the functionality for effective monitoring and on premise protection against the large volume od data discrepency and the attacks on the network externally. As the cost incurred due to network malfunction is huge, the demand for reliable network analyzer increases to identify and mitigate the threats of network malfunction and increase the business performance. Andrisoft Wanguard's system wide observation of complex, multilayer, exchanged or steered conditions together with its one of a kind blend of features is explicitly intended to address the difficulty of pinpointing and mitigating threats such as DDoS attacks, misuse of services, and interference of best-effort traffic with critical or real-time traffic
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Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
The global network traffic analyzer market size to grow from USD 745.8 Million in 2017 to USD 1,631.2 Million by 2022, at a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 16.9%.
The Network analysis Software provides solutions such as: Network Security Monitoring, Network Bandwidth Monitoring, Peering Analysis, Network Capacity Planning and Network Traffic Forensic, Traffic Behavior Analysis and Network Troubleshooting in different parts of the world.
Network traffic analyzer vendors, Network and system integrators, Managed Service Providers (MSPs), Cloud service providers, Internet Service Providers (ISPs), Fixed and mobile broadband network providers, Communications Service Providers (CSPs), Content Delivery Network (CDN) providers, Enterprises and Network managers
The network traffic analyzer ecosystem includes companies, such as Cisco (US), SolarWinds (US), NETSCOUT SYSTEMS (US), ManageEngine, a Division of Zoho Corporation (US), Kentik (US), Ipswitch (US), Colasoft (China), Genie Networks (Taiwan), Nokia (Finland), HPE (US), CA Technologies (US), Plixer (US) and NetFlow Auditor (IdeaData) (Australia).
The increasing need for in-depth visibility into the network security and quality of service, and rapid growth of network infrastructure are some of the factors driving the growth of the market.
Lack of awareness among network administrators to choose a solution as per business needs and high cost associated with network traffic analyzer tools would hamper the growth of network traffic analyzer market.