Bandwidth Capacity Planning

Bandwidth capacity planning provides the groundwork for ensuring that your network can effectively support future usage levels in a way that doesn’t impact business performance.

Bandwidth is a measure of the rate of data transmission across a certain path, calculated in bits per second. When bandwidth is high, a large amount of data can flow per second through a given path. When bandwidth is low your overall network performance becomes slow. Bandwidth capacity planning allows you to both optimize current network usage and be proactive in allocating sufficient bandwidth for future needs.

When you plan for your bandwidth capacity, the first step is understanding your current network traffic patterns. Once you identify how your network is being used, you can find the sources of low bandwidth, and decide how to address your top talkers.

Effective bandwidth capacity planning ultimately allows you to make your network faster and more effective to avoid business disruptions and save money.

Yes! With NTA, bandwidth usage alerts are available based on customizable thresholds.

With high bandwidth utilization, your network can experience a range of issues, from slow performance to complete shutdown. Faster bandwidth capacity analysis means you can respond more quickly to a problem. If it takes you too long to identify a bandwidth hog, your end users may already feel the results of slow traffic before you can address the issue.

Proactively identifying low-capacity top talkers is a key feature of network capacity management. By identifying sources of low bandwidth as soon as they arise, alerts can allow you to engage in bandwidth capacity planning before your end-users experience a slow network.

Alerts from NTA are the key to a fast response to high bandwidth utilization. With out-of-the-box alerts, you can receive emails as soon as a top talker’s percent utilization exceeds 75%. You can also customize the alert threshold to fit your business’s specific needs. Real-time email alerts are a key to fast and effective bandwidth capacity planning.

Yes! With NTA reporting features, including the Top Talkers Report, you can customize your bandwidth usage reporting to fit your specific criteria. You can decide what percent utilization exceeds an alert threshold, select the data points you wish to include in your report, and correlate data points to determine trends.

The goal of bandwidth usage reporting is ultimately to be proactive about your bandwidth usage, so you don’t have to find out about a bandwidth hog after it’s too late. NTA collects a large amount of network performance data in its NTA Flow Storage Database, as well as CBQoS data sources. The software allows you to fill auto-generated templates with the data you need for accurate analysis.

There are built-in reports available with NTA like average and peak traffic rates, historical traffic reports, and any other network capacity data you may need. To access NTA’s reporting templates, just select the Report Category in the All Reports page of your NTA dashboard. You can also generate your own reporting template on the All Reports page.

Top Talkers are the IP addresses that consume the most bandwidth in your network. When your network is experiencing slow performance due to traffic, there’s a good chance it’s because of just one or a few top talkers. One of the most important goals of bandwidth capacity planning is to identify top talkers as early as possible, so you can address bandwidth issues before they affect your entire application performance.

Identifying top talkers is easy with NTA's monitoring features. With visualized data flows, you can understand which IP addresses are using the most bandwidth on your network. With NTA’s top talkers monitoring features, you can optimize your bandwidth capacity planning and minimize the guesswork.

With SolarWinds^® NetFlow Traffic Analyzer (NTA,) you can plan for bandwidth capacity using a wide variety of monitoring features. NTA allows you to:

• View bandwidth usage from different grouping categories (IP address, application, and protocol)
  
• Analyze a wide range of flow data, from Cisco NetFlow, NetStream, s-Flow, wireless traffic trends, and more
  
• Optimize bandwidth usage with Class Based Quality of Service (CBQoS) data, which helps you to determine which devices deserve the most bandwidth
• Troubleshoot bandwidth issues with PerfStack, NTA’s comprehensive data analytics tool

Managing your network requires you to quickly understand when traffic is slow, why traffic is slow, and how to fix it. With NTA, SolarWinds gives you the tools to optimize bandwidth capacity at each step of the way. Whether you’re looking at application performance data, IP address bandwidth data, or wait time data, NTA offers analytics for all your bandwidth capacity planning needs—with customizable reporting.