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How to validate the suitability of a link?

Hello,

We have number of WAN links and the users are saying that their access is slow. What is the industry standard way to report on the utilization of a link? The average utilization would be very low since the link is unused outside of business hours. Even during business hours the link may be not heavily utilized. However there are times when the link would be at peak utilization, during large email or file transfers for example. What is the "correct" way to average/count/calculate/report on the times when the utilization is 100% vs when the utilization is less than 5%? Is there an accepted industry best practice?

- Regards,

Richard

  • Applying logic:

    You do not care what the utilization is outside of business hours, so simply exclude all data in that period from your consideration; don't even use it for comparison.

    What is the 95th percentile during business hours?

    (it will take some SQL to write a report for this)

  • Adding to what RichardLetts​​ was saying, i often use SQL to create reports for people that give, for example, the percent of business hours where interface utilization is above a threshold value like 90% of capacity, and then add in some charts that show the utilization rates over time so it is easy to see if the higher utilization periods come along with any recognizable trends that might be able to tweak.  Are we always maxing it out at 9 am when staff are all logging into their VDI?  Is there a report that gets pushed out at 2 pm every Thursday triggering the bandwidth contention?  If you don't know SQL you can do this using the Orion web report interface by just setting up the criteria in the data source similarly to this example.  (my screenshot is from the NPM 12 RC, yours may differ slightly)

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    Hope that helps

    -Marc Netterfield

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