Capacity Planning Screen

The WAN Insights Capacity List screen showing circuit capacity is available from the left-hand navigation menu under WAN Insights > Capacity Planning. It has two tabs: the Capacity tab and the Settings tab.

Capacity tab

The Capacity tab initially shows the Capacity List screen, with capacity utilization of every router and interface in your network. Circuits approaching saturation are listed at the top in order of severity under the Utilization columns.

This screen lists origin point as router and site, for a given interface name, with separate columns for in and out traffic. The in and out numbers represent collective flow volume, namely everything coming into that router and everything going out of it all bundled together, on that interface. Thus, this page is interface-centric rather than endpoint pair-centric.

Color-coded warning levels match what’s in the Settings tab under Define Warning Thresholds.

Columns displayed are:

• Interface. The interface name, for example blue or mpls.

• Router. The router identifier or hostname.

• Site. The site identifier or location name.

• Utilization (in). A percentage with color coding showing how saturated the circuit is for inbound traffic, compared with the Capacity In column.

• Capacity (in). The inbound circuit capacity in Mbps. This number either comes from vManage or can be changed or provided in WAN Insights instead.

• Utilization (out). A percentage with color coding showing how saturated the circuit is for outbound traffic, compared with the Capacity In column.

• Capacity (out). The outbound circuit capacity in Mbps.

Filters available are:

• Interface. Drop-down with freeform text search. For example, biz-internet or bronze.

• Router. Drop-down with freeform text search, search for individual routers by hostname.

• Site. Drop-down with freeform text search. Search for a site by name, for example “New” to find sites named New York City and New Orleans.

• Severity. This filter is tied to user-defined severity levels on the Settings tab under warning thresholds, so for example if you have the Moderate warning level set to 60%, then this filter displays only interfaces with saturation at 60% or higher

Utilization Aggregate and Severity Color-Coding

The percentages shown in the Utilization columns on the Capacity List screen are affected by the aggregation operator that is selected on the Settings tab. This aggregator is labeled Utilization Aggregate on the Settings tab, and is a drop-down selection list.

• On Settings, you can select an aggregation operator of either 95th, 98th, or 100th percentile (i.e., the maximum). This operator applies to the interface traffic time series.

• The interface traffic is aggregated in 10-minute intervals, meaning that we keep the average traffic over each 10-minute interval.

• If you want to focus on peak utilization, you can use the 100th percentile as the aggregation operator. However, this might result in some outliers: interfaces flagged as having Severe utilization, even if that saturation happened only once or twice over the past several months.

• By contrast, if you choose the 95th percentile, you can exclude those one-time outliers and show a utilization value that is more representative of your traffic 95% of the time.

The aggregation utilization value itself is determined by the Utilization Aggregate. However, which values are shown in a warning red or yellow is determined by a different item on Settings, under Define Warning Thresholds.

Capacity Views vs. Recommendation Views

What is the difference between the Capacity screens and the Recommendations and Site Details screens?

• Recommendations and Site Details are both focused on one selected application category at a time, but all circuits (interfaces) between a particular endpoint pair (pair of routers) are considered. The main focus is path quality, with throughput shown on detail screens.

• Capacity focuses on overall utilization for a single origin router, and thus considers all traffic – which is broken out separately for each interface. The focus is on saturation and identifying circuits that are running close to capacity on a recurring basis.

Settings tab

The Settings tab on the capacity screen lets you enter or modify circuit capacities, set office hours, define usage aggregation percentiles for the capacity summary page, and set warning thresholds that affect the color-coded severity levels on the list and detail windows.

Add Bandwidth Information

Click the Enter/Edit button to access the Enter or Upload Maximum Bandwidth Modal screen, where you can use the bulk download and upload feature to upload manually edited data from a CSV file.

Set Time Window

The time window refers to office hours, presumably when users will be working and generating the application traffic that is the focus of WAN Insights path quality recommendations. If you set this to Office Hours only, bandwidth saturation will only be flagged if it occurs during daytime office hours. You might want to use office hours if you have heavy backup traffic at night, and you only want to monitor saturation when people are working.

Office hours, if used, are pre-set to be 9am and 5pm, Monday through Friday, local time to where the router is located.

Set Utilization Aggregate

The utilization aggregate refers to how much sampling is done to determine when saturation is reached. Traffic volume is measured in 10-minute increments. For example, if this is set to 100% percentile, then that potentially means that a single 10-minute spike within the past 3 months would be raised on the capacity list screen with a color-coded warning badge.

See Measurement and Aggregation for more information.

Define Warning Thresholds

The warning thresholds are the percentage of saturation that displays a color-coded visual indicator on the Capacity List screen. There are thresholds for Moderate (yellow) and Severe (red). For example, if you need several extra months’ additional lead time in order to upgrade circuit capacities, you could set Moderate level at 60% and 75% as Severe.