Well, like I mentioned, a spike of a few seconds, or a couple of minutes isn’t that big a deal. I still would like to try to track down what is happening at that time, for instance, is it happening at the same time every day, such as coffee break time, when everyone wants to log into Youtube, or CNN, and watch some streaming video? Or could it be some process that’s going haywire for some reason? If the spikes are affecting your network adversely, such as getting reports that the network is slow everyday at 10:00 am and 2:00 pm, then something is going on that needs to be addressed. Personally, when our backups go off at night, our spikes are sometimes upwards of 150% of our normal bandwidth. Luckily, our ISP, which is another state agency, allows for that, and it’s no big deal. If it’s possible, try to get daily reports from your ISP for a period of a week or two, and that should help you to analyze possible trends…
Joe Heaton From: Chris Blair [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Tuesday, January 08, 2008 7:29 AM To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: RE: Bandwidth It does, thanks for the reply. When you say 70%, should we not be spiking that high during business hours? All of our activity is during the day, the T1’s are basically empty at night, maybe some Microsoft and Anti-virus updates. During the day I have seen spikes as high as 2.9 out of 3.0. I am going to talk to our ISP to get more detailed reports and get some averages for data in/out during business hours. _____ From: Joe Heaton [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Tuesday, January 08, 2008 9:20 AM To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: RE: Bandwidth 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 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> ~
