If the spikes are only a couple of minutes, and during off-peak hours, then it shouldn’t be a big concern. 70% is the rule of thumb, but that’s really meant as an overall figure, for instance, if you were at 2.5Mb out of 3.0Mb all the time, then you would definitely need to look at either upgrading the pipe, or figuring out if something is out of whack with your network, causing the bandwidth usage. For instance, look for streaming audio/video, possible spyware issues, etc. When I first got here, my supervisor was certain we needed to up our bandwidth, based on a monthly report she was getting from our ISP. What I did was request a more granular report, a weekly, and saw that the spikes were happening in the middle of the night, but during the day, we were well below 70% usage. We use an offsite backup solution, and the spikes were the backups running each night.
Hope this helps, Joe Heaton From: Chris Blair [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Tuesday, January 08, 2008 7:01 AM To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: Bandwidth We are suspecting we need to increase of our current bandwidth. We are now accessing applications over a VPN tunnel and have added more users over the past few months. Application and Internet usage can get slow during the day. We subscribed to our ISP’s bandwidth monitoring reports and I can now view hourly, daily, weekly and monthly bar graphs of our usage. So now that I have these reports, my problem is interpreting them. My Googling is failing me this morning. How much usage is too much? If we are spiking up to 2.5m out of 3.0m, is that OK? What is OK? We are running 2 T-1’s that are bonded . Yesterday we Averaged 123.4k in max 1.1m and 0.4m out max 1.8m. Is this good, bad? Thanks, Chris This e-mail is confidential and may be privileged and/or proprietary. If you are not the intended recipient, any review, disclosure, copying, or use of this e-mail is prohibited. No virus found in this incoming message. Checked by AVG Free Edition. Version: 7.5.516 / Virus Database: 269.17.13/1213 - Release Date: 1/7/2008 9:14 AM No virus found in this outgoing message. Checked by AVG Free Edition. Version: 7.5.516 / Virus Database: 269.17.13/1213 - Release Date: 1/7/2008 9:14 AM ~ Upgrade to Next Generation Antispam/Antivirus with Ninja! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbelt-software.com/SunbeltMessagingNinja.cfm> ~
