Neil wrote regarding '[SLE] OT: Calculating 95th Percentile' on Sun, Oct 31 at 05:46:
Sorry for the off topic post, but I cant think of anywhere else to ask about this. I have googled and failed to find any valid answers.
I understand the principle of 95th percentile for bandwidth charging, but I dont get how it is monitored.
Our bandwidth is provided through a Summit48 switch / router. We get given 1MB/s bursting to 2MB/s.
Is this achieved by configuring our port on the switch/router to have a max speed of 2MB/s ? then querying the switch/router every 5 minutes for the current throughput ?
Perhaps I'm looking at this in an overly simplistic light, but don't you just take the customer's bandwidth usage at samples of n minutes, and then bill them for the usage point at which 95% of their usage is below? In other words, make a chart, find the mean and standard deviation, and add 2 standard deviations to the mean usage. That'll get you the point at which 5% of the n-minute average samples are above and 95% of the n-minute samples are below. On the other hand, if you have 1MB/s that can burst to 2MB/s, only 5% of your traffic should be between 1MB/s and 2MB/s. Enforce that any way you want - allow full pipe usage for a few hours until 5% of the month's time is used, then bump down to 1MB/s, charge the customer if they use too much, allow passing 1 of every 20 packets that would otherwise be dropped by the rate limiter, etc. Maybe that helps. Maybe it doesn't... --Danny