Visibility Leads to More Business

This is the story of a customer's journey of modernizing their Internet connectivity with the help of their telecom agent and Bumblebee Networks.

WAN Link Utilization Dashboard

Modernizing the Internet connectivity

A few months ago the telecom agent onboarded a customer onto the Bumblebee platform. The agent is tasked to modernize the customer's Internet connectivity while providing alerts and visibility. With the help of service provider the agent adopted Bumblebee Networks and deployed a CPE device at the edge of the network. They upgraded from 100Mbps Internet speed to 1Gbps with the expectation that the 10x increase in Internet bandwidth should provide plenty of bandwidth for their business.

Troubleshooting the poor performance

Almost immediately after the Internet upgrade, their employees start to complain about poor application performance. Checking the Bumblebee portal WAN Link Utilization dashboard, one could see that the bandwidth utilization was only at 10%! Speed Test run from a client browser to Bumblebee CPE showed that their local network throughput was only 100mbps! Further troubleshooting revealed that the Bumblebee CPE LAN port that connects with the customer's local network only negotiated to 100Mbps even though the port is capable of 1Gbps. As a result customer can consume 10% of the WAN bandwidth. To make the matter worse, with the promise of 1Gbps, customer's backup application tuned up its parallelization and hogged up all the bandwidth and squeezed the regular application traffic.

Upgrade the internal network

After some diagnosing, it turned out that the Ethernet switch that Bumblebee LAN port connects to was an old and unmanaged Ethernet switch. To fix this, the customer worked with the agent to spin up a project to upgrade a few Ethernet switches to make sure Gigabit Ethernet ports run at the speed specified.

Visibility reveals the truth

Fast forward a few months later, the intended upgrade completed. Customer's local network now runs at 1Gbps full speed. Mission accomplished and customer is happy.

But wait. As the customer checked their WAN Link Utilization dashboard, they discovered the backup application and other applications takes up the entire WAN bandwidth. The site is already running at 100% link utilization. It turns out this is quite a busy site.

This journey is all documented on the image above. As you can see, the WAN bandwidth utilization was 10% (100Mbps) up until October 9th. As soon as the switches upgrade complete, the link utilization shot up to 100%. The 100% upload link utilization is attributed to the backup application and high download link utilization is attributed to other business applications the site uses.

Visibility leads to more business

As the visibility reveals the bandwidth consumption is already at its current maximum, the telecom agent and the customer realize that they need a plan soon to upgrade to even higher bandwidth, for example, a 10Gbps link. But that is not going to be a simple upgrade since firewalls, switches and routers on site all need to support 10Gbps in order to take advantage of the 10Gbps Internet bandwidth. Indeed that is the next big project they plan to tackle from assessment, planning, budgeting to implementation. One may say they've get some work cut out for them in the coming year.