95th percentile ?

Question

What exactly is the meaning of the 95th percentile on Orion custom charts ?

ex:  site x  95th percentile: Receive Utilization is 22.34%, Transmit Utilization is 10.23%

this site has a 256K link

If someone could put this into layman's terms for me, I'd appreciate it.

Thanks,

Doug

Network_Guru · Answer

In short Orion ignores the top 5% and buttom 5% of the polling results (in other words ignores spikes) That means that if you have a 256 kbps line and you're monitoring traffic - and the usual load is around 128 kbps but one reading pushes the load to 256 kbps Orion will ignore this reading as it doesn't really represent the actual trafic load seen in the bigger picture. 95th Percentile is commonly used by service providers for billing bandwidth usage. Statistically this figure better represents the circuit capacity required to transport traffic than the average traffic statistic. Here's a couple of links:

sedmo · Answer

Try this link.

http://www.solarwinds.com/NetPerfMon/SolarWinds/wwhelp/wwhimpl/common/html/wwhelp.htm?context=SolarWinds&file=OrionPH95th.htm

uscallesen · Answer

In short Orion ignores the top 5% and buttom 5% of the polling results (in other words ignores spikes)

That means that if you have a 256 kbps line and you're monitoring traffic - and the usual load is around 128 kbps but one reading pushes the load to 256 kbps Orion will ignore this reading as it doesn't really represent the actual trafic load seen in the bigger picture.