One of the primary responsibilities of a network operator is to monitor the network and bandwidth utilization. This may be for various business purposes, such as:
- Ensuring that low-priority or scavenger traffic is not choking the network and making business-critical traffic suffer
- Ensuring that the WAN provider is able to provide the committed traffic rate on the access circuit
- Use the result for capacity planning to upgrade or downgrade the bandwidth
Figure 19.1: WAN topology
In most of the troubleshooting and analysis recipes we have discussed so far, the data capture will be done as close as possible to the application endpoints. In order to measure WAN circuit utilization, we may need additional consideration to measure the bandwidth accurately. In the preceding topology, WAN-Router1 may be connected through a 1 Gbps interface...