MX bandwidth usage

[SnowyHill]

Hi everyone,

Our net admin left and I've been put in charge of monitoring our network.  (Note I am not even really in IT so please bear with me.)

I have zero experience in Meraki and I've searched all over for some solid answers to this question but I can't seem to find an answer that I understand, so I'm hoping someone can help.

One of our remote sites has a 100/10 Mbps circuit.  I'm simply trying to figure out how to tell how much of this circuit we are using via the Dashboard.

I know I can go to Security & SD-WAN, Appliance Status, and choose the Uplink tab and I can see the live traffic from WAN1 and 2.  (We are only using WAN1.)

In looking at the graph, I see the traffic in real time but I don't know how to really read this graph.  The left hand side of the graph shows "0Mb/s" at the bottom, and goes up to ".3Mb/s", ".6Mb/s", ".9Mb/s" and the very top shows "1.2Mb/s."

Let's say the graph shows a spike to the top of the graph at 1.2Mb/s.  What does this mean in relation to our 100/10 circuit?  Does this mean we are literally utilizing only 1% of our circuit at the time of that spike?

Other times, I'll look at the graph and it changes on the left hand side to read (again, from the bottom), "0Kb/s", "200Kb/s", 400Kb/s", "600Kb/s", and "800Kb/s" at the top.

Why is this changing from Mb/s to Kb/s sometimes?  Is this changing based on the amount of traffic (low or high amount of traffic) on a real time basis?  So when it changes to Kb/s and I see a spike to, say, "800Kb/s", that means we are utilizing even LESS than the spike I mention above that's measured in Mb/s? (So, not even 1% of the 100Mbps circuit.)

I'm just trying to figure out how much of our pipe we are using on a daily/weekly/monthly basis.  10%, 25%, 50%, etc.

Can anyone lend a hand as to how to really help me understand this?  If we are paying for a 100Mbps circuit, how can I tell how much of that we are actually utilizing?

Thanks so much for any help anyone can provide.

[Brash]

Hello,

I'm fairly new to Meraki myself so I can't give you a definite answer on the accuracy of the WAN uplink utilization. Personally mine appears accurate.

As you mentioned, you can view it live on the "uplink" tab, or historically on the summary tab, allowing you to select different time periods.

The Y-Axis labels on the graphs (Kbps/Mbps) are contextual to provide a better view. Therefore depending on the time period you're looking at and the network traffic within that time period, you'll see different values labelled.

[cmr · Accepted solution]

@SnowyHill below is a graph from one of our MXs

The dark blue line shows the amount of traffic going into the MX from the WAN port, the light blue line is download + upload, so to see what you are sending out you need to look at the difference.

As you can see we have a fairly constant (over the short time that the live view shows) download of about 300Mb/s and as it is a one armed concentrator (only the WAN 1 port is connected, no LAN ports used), the total is pretty much double (~600Mb/s).

If you are seeing the scale up to 1.2Mb/s then yes, at that time the traffic passing through the MX really is that low.  Below is the public internet firewall for a site that is currently closed, that shows just the Meraki 'chatter' where the devices are talking to the dashboard, with the spike at the end where I started looking at it:

There is a set of longer term graphs on the Summary tab and there you can choose 2 hours, 1 day, 1 week or 1 month.  Below is the 1 day graph for the low usage device showing that it does see traffic when the site is open, though the data points are averaged so you will not see absolute short term peaks:

[SnowyHill]

Awesome answer, thank you so much!!!

And thank you to everyone else who replied, I really appreciate it!!!

Take care everyone!

[Aaron_Wilson]

The graphs are good, just keep in mind the average changes based on date range. The shorter the time frame, the more granular the average, so numbers will appear higher. Longer the time range, averages are spread out, things flatten more.

The analytics screen under the Network me is also a good spot to look. It is not realtime, but gives you a sense of what has occurred, when spikes happened, and what apps contributed to the spikes.