One of my monthly tasks is to review our SolarWinds reports from NPM to determine if there are any insights I can provide to the first-level support teams. One of the insights I try to provide to some of our SMB clients is whether or not they should investigate adding more bandwidth to their site to accommodate a growing/changing business profile. Currently, I report peak % utilization and, for customers who violate that %, I run manual graphs to search for plateaued or sustained bandwidth usage that might be indicative of constrained bandwidth.
I've been thinking about how to minimize my manual intervention into the reporting process. Here are my thoughts:
1) Build a second alert that is similar to the % utilization for bandwidth, but that waits a fixed period of time (TBD) before triggering. If that alert triggers, I can assume that the site has sustained peak demand for a period of time. (Say 30 minutes, etc.) I can simply count the number of alerts per site and then make my recommendation based on those alerts.
2) Build some sort of timer that calculates the total time (based on polling intervals) that the % utilization value is surpassed. At the end of the month, run a report that gives the total time (again, based on polling intervals, so it wouldn't be exact) that a site was using more than the threshold value for upload and download bandwidth.
Does anyone have an experience with this type of reporting? Any other ideas for building reports that will help me analyse bandwidth usage over the course of the month?
Thanks,
Josh