Network traffic monitoring is one of the most crucial tasks for any IT professional or sysadmin. Whether you’re troubleshooting performance issues, hunting for security vulnerabilities, or optimizing bandwidth usage, understanding how to effectively monitor network traffic can be the difference between a healthy network infrastructure and costly outages.

When users complain of dropped video calls, stuttering applications, or files that won't upload properly, 90% of the time you can probably blame packet loss. It's one of those network performance issues that make you feel like the whole network is shot, even when your equipment is fine.