WAN Link Utilization
- Sherry Wei
- Dec 3, 2024
- 3 min read
Updated: May 16
What is the WAN Link Utilization Dashboard for?
WAN Link Utilization Dashboard is part of the Intelligent Edge dashboard group. It answers the following questions
How much percentage of provisioned bandwidth a given site is consuming, for example, is the site consuming 10%, 40% or 50% of bandwidth in a download direction (from Internet to site) on a 1Gbps WAN link speed in the past hour, past day and past week? How about upload link utilization?
What is the peak hour (in a 24 hours cycle) for the site and what is Peak Hour Throughput?
What is the Peak Hour Throughput trend in the last 3 years?
The answers to these questions provide IT department insights to the bandwidth consumption characteristics and trends of a given site. Are we under provisioning or over provisioning? It helps planning for upsizing your WAN bandwidth to meet future demands. In other situations you may consider downsizing the bandwidth if the link consumption is consistently below a threshold.
Why does Bumblebee solution offer the most accurate data throughput report?
The traditional method does not capture burst rate. A typical link utilization report is based on data throughput measured at per minute or per 5 minute interval, i.e., the throughput, megabit per second, is the total data transferred in one minute divided by 60, or the total data transferred in 5 minutes devided by 300. Such measurements significantly under report the link utilization as many TCP transactions complete in seconds. The traditional method is largely due to insufficient CPU power of the demarcation device.
In the Bumblebee solution, data throughput is measured at per second level, that is, the throughput, megabit per second, is the total data transferred in that one second. The one minute throughput the peak second throughput, i.e., the highest throughput out of the 60 seconds sample represents the minute throughput. This captures burst rate.
What is the chart for upload/download utilization?
The above chart describes, for a given site, the upload and download link utilization during the past hour, pas 3 hours, pas day and week.
How is the link utilization calculated?
The link utilization is calculated by the data throughput divided by the provisioned link speed. For example, a download data throughput is 340mbps for a 1Gbps download speed, then the link utilization is 340/1000 = 34%
What is the Peak Hour and Peak Hour Throughput?
Peak Hour represents the busiest hour where throughput reaches the highest in the 24 hour day cycle.
The Peak Hour is a scatter plot where each dot (black dot for download and yellow dot for upload) represents the peak hour of one day. The Y-axis is the peak hour throughput in Mbps. The idea of this plot is that over time a pattern emerges where the most concentrated dots represent the peak hour and its throughput for that site.
Below is an example of the scatter plot, while the plot is not definitively showing which hour is the peak hour, it does illustrate the working hours of a day.
What is the Peak Hour Throughput Trend?
The Peak Hour Throughput trend answers the question how much WAN bandwidth is being consumed, should an upgrade be planned?
The Peak Hour Throughput Trend represents WAN Link Utilization in a long period.
The Peak Hour Throughput is stored for 3 years for customers to see the usage trend. The chart is updated weekly, recording the Peak Hour for the week (The highest Peak Hour in a 7 day period)
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