With increasing bandwidth demands, network professionals are constantly looking to optimize network resources, ensure adequate bandwidth, and deliver high performance. Often, buying more bandwidth is not a priority or an option due to limited budgets and pressure to reduce IT costs.  This white paper describes how to leverage best practices to monitor, baseline, and manage the network bandwidth and performance. It also highlights how to identify and eliminate issues such as unwanted traffic, unwanted protocols, and network problems with factory default switch configurations.