Traffic Insights FPS Monitoring
Last updated
Last updated
The FPS Monitoring screen in Traffic Insights > Settings lets you monitor flow records per second (FPS) and is where you can adjust FPS limits and, consequently, your Traffic Insights unit consumption. See for information about other screens within Traffic Insights.
However, traffic monitors may also send records to forwarding agents that do not meet the minimum field requirements or are a different kind of record than ones ThousandEyes supports. The forwarding agent classifies these records as “unsupported”. Unsupported flow records are not ingested into the platform and do not count towards your FPS limit but they do consume computing resources on the traffic monitor and forwarding agent. ThousandEyes therefore tracks the rate of unsupported records received for troubleshooting purposes, and you can find the unsupported FPS rate (peak) on the Traffic Monitors and Forwarders tabs within Traffic Insights > Settings.
You don’t always have control over how many flow records your network produces. Even expected heavy traffic that is outside your “norm” may be infrequent or short-lived. For this reason, we track your FPS rate in a way that discounts anomalous daily peaks that could throw off your otherwise normal rate: we count only the top 95% of your peak rates per day, removing the top 5% of peak rates to smooth out your usage curve.
View your peak rate In the Daily FPS History table below the chart.
Ideally, you have trialed Traffic Insights for a short time; doing so gives you an idea of your average daily FPS usage. The Update Limit To tile helps you to keep track of your highest usage over the last seven days. Use this information to set your initial FPS limit. If you have not trialed Traffic Insights or are unsure what your limit should be set at, speak to your ThousandEyes account manager for help.
To set your initial limit:
Click Update Limit in the top right.
In the resulting side panel, type the new limit into the “Update the limit to” field, bearing in mind the number must be a multiple of thousands and must be above zero. For example, your new limit can be as low as 1,000 or as high as 500,000 (the upper limit for all account groups), but it cannot be 32 or 498,653.
Aside from merely setting your new limit, the side panel that opens when you click the Update Limit button offers some useful information to help you understand both the limits you can set and their unit consumption implications.
All limits are set per account group. The name of the account group you’re setting limits for appears at the top.
Under Unit Allocation, a dark grey bar represents the total number of units your organization has purchased for the month. Within that bar, and listed below the bar, are certain unit allocations, given in both units and FPS.
The blue portion shows your current units allocated for Traffic Insights, listed as “Current Traffic Insights Units”.
The brown bar illustrates the number of units you should update to based on recent usage, listed as “Recommended Units”.
When you type a new FPS rate into the “Update the limit to” field, the number of units associated with that rate are automatically calculated beside the field.
Your FPS usage may change over time and you may want to either adjust your limit up or adjust your FPS rate down to stay within your set limit. You adjust your limit up in the same way as setting your initial limit, but there are a few additional considerations:
You cannot set your new limit lower than the Update Limit To FPS rate, though you may adjust it higher. The Update Limit To tile looks back over the last seven days and sets the limit requirement to the highest FPS rate during that period, rounding up to the nearest thousand.
Attempting to set the limit lower than your Update Limit To rate results in an error.
The maximum limit for any account group is 500,000 FPS.
You must have enough units available in the current month to increase your limit to the desired amount. If there are not enough units available, an error will appear until you adjust your limit to a value within your available units. If you do not have enough units in the following month to cover an increase, you will receive an email notifying you to purchase more units.
To decrease the FPS rate that your network is generating, we suggest to decrease the number of interfaces you monitor per traffic monitor or your number of traffic monitors.
Once you go over your limit the first time, the Days Above Limit counter kicks in. If you go over your limit for 30 days, either consecutively or non-consecutively over the course of a rolling year without updating your limit, ThousandEyes stops collecting Traffic Insights data for you.
A rolling year means that your overages are counted for the previous 365 days from today. The Days Above Limit counter reduces as each older overage day ages out.
The Days Above Limit counter resets to zero when you update your limit in line with or higher than your highest FPS rate over the last seven days (the Update Limit To rate).
To view information about days you have gone over your limit in the last 365 days, sort the Status column of the table by “Over Limit”.
While the Days Above Limit counter looks back over a year, the Update Limit To rate looks back only over the last seven days. This allows you to update your limit to accommodate your recent usage rather than historic usage levels.
Your current limit is 5,000 FPS. In the last 365 days, you have gone over your limit 29 times without updating your limit. Your Days Above Limit tile displays 29. You went over your limit four days in a row 361 days ago. Tomorrow, if you don’t go over your limit, your days above the limit will reduce to 28, since one of the days above the limit over the preceding 365 days has aged out. The next day, with no further overages, the counter reduces again to 27.
That same day, you update your limit. The highest overage over the last 365 days was 8,452 FPS, but the highest rate over the last seven days was 6,782 FPS. The Update Limit To rate is therefore 7,000, which you update to. Your Days Above Limit counter clears immediately to zero. The previous 27 days of overage are wiped clean and the counter starts again when you first go over 7,000 FPS.
If you went over your limit for 30 days and your access to Traffic Insights data ceased, you can automatically restart your access by setting the limit to at least the Update Limit To rate shown from the last time data was collected, and ensuring you have the units to cover the amount.
When you land on the Traffic Insights , the visual timeline graph displays the last 90 days of your FPS usage (at the 95th percentile – see about why we use the 95th percentile), compared against the FPS limits you’ve set over the same timeframe. The table underneath the timeline provides FPS usage details for each day in the timeline. The top of the page shows three tiles: your current FPS limit, the number of days you have been above your FPS limit, and the lowest possible FPS limit you must update to if you have gone over your current limit.
ThousandEyes ingests flow records that meet minimum field requirements (see for a discussion of flow records and their minimum and recommended fields). The forwarding agent that receives these flow records classify them as “supported” and count them towards your FPS limit.
Your Current Limit is the FPS usage level your account is expected to adhere to, and for which you’ve purchased a certain number of units. It is not a hard limit in that it is adjustable and you can go over it without initial consequence, but long-term overages will affect your access to Traffic Insights. See , below.
The light grey portion shows the number of unallocated units you have with which to increase your FPS rate, listed beneath as “Available Units”. Available units are calculated taking into account the current usage in this account group, the projected usage in this billing period (assuming tests will continue to run throughout the billing period), other existing unit allocations (for example for Cloud Insights), account group , and units available in the organization as a whole if no account group quotas are defined.
For example, if your current limit is 5,000 FPS, and you went over the limit once in the last seven days to 5,372 FPS, and once to 6,013, the Update Limit To tile would display 7,000 FPS. If you went over the limit nine days ago to 7,896 FPS, your limit requirement would still be 7,000 FPS. You may therefore adjust your limit to any multiple of thousands 7,000 or above. See for more information about going over your limit.
When your usage goes over the current FPS limit established for your account, you receive an email warning you that you have exceeded your FPS limit; a warning displays at the top of your screen; the status column in the Daily FPS History table displays “Over Limit” for each day you’re over, and; the Days Above Limit tile at the top calculates and displays the number of days you’ve been above your limit (see image, above).
