How do you guys report bandwidth usage to your upper management, specifically VPs and SVPs?

Some of the attributes of a typical report include: download utilization, upload utilization, total utilization, max utilization, min utilization, and average utilization. But some of those attributes are not fully indicative of a circuit's usage.

Examples:
Max utilization will only reflect peak usage, which may not be the norm. Min utilization will only reflect the traffic conditions of when the circuit is least being used, and not reflect the traffic conditions during the business hours. Average utilization will consider the max and min, but may skew the numbers toward the min depending on the traffic distribution. Total utilization may work in describing the utilization, but you have to report it only for business hours. And since you're summing the download/upload traffic, the reader must understand that the circuit rate must also be doubled. Download/upload utilization may work as well, but again you need only report for business hours and you have to report on the highest of the two.

For core devices we have an in-house tool that polls all the devices and then creates various graphs using RRDtool and for end user devices we have a separate platform that polls the devices and creates pretty graphs that are accessible by the end users.

There are plenty of free pieces of software that you could use to do this, like Cacti or Nmis (http://www.sins.com.au/nmis/)

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David
CCIE R&S #38338, CCIP, CCNP

http://networkbroadcast.co.uk - My Blog
http://twitter.com/davidrothera

I'm specifically looking for the kind of information provided on the reports, not the tools used to derive the reports. Sorry for being unclear.

Have a look at this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burstable_billing

I know it's not for billing, but it's down the same road

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www.mellowd.co.uk/ccie/

^ this

I generate daily, weekly and monthly reports based on circuit utilization. The cornerstone of my reports are based on the 95th percentile. (We use SolarWinds) I have several customized SQL commands that query specific time-ranges (e.g. business hours of operation, M-F 8-5p) and reports on circuit utilization based on the 95th percentile. IMO, it's the best way to understand and better determine capacity planning.

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AAS, A+, CCNA
(NP in Progress)

We use SolarWinds to but I am a bit weak on SQL commands.
Would you willing to share some of your SQl scripts on this with me?

Cacti,, cacti.net.
it's free and accurate, you could write any plugin you want and graph it.

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"Nothing Is Limited, Except Our Understanding To The Universe"