Overall Netflix bandwidth usage numbers on a network?

Jonathan Towne jtowne at slic.com
Sat Dec 3 00:58:48 UTC 2011


Wow.. not sure how I missed that option.  Exactly why I posted before dumping
a bunch of time into a bottomless bucket!

Thanks.. :)

-- Jonathan Towne


On Sat, Dec 03, 2011 at 12:56:34AM +0000, Andrew Mulholland scribbled:
# Surely this is what Netflow is for.
# 
# 
# no need to re-invent the wheel.
# 
# 
# Andrew
# 
# 
# On Sat, Dec 3, 2011 at 12:47 AM, Jonathan Towne <jtowne at slic.com> wrote:
# 
# > Been lurking for a while and posed a question to a few folks without much
# > response, figured someone here might've done something like this already.
# >
# > So, before I go about building wheels that already exist:
# >
# > I'm interested in doing a bit of a passive survey of bandwidth usage on
# > my network (smallish isp, a few thousand DSL/FTTx customers) to understand
# > the percentage of average/overall traffic generated by Netflix streaming.
# >
# > What I have available is a few gigabit transport switches providing me with
# > mirror ports, a juniper MX series router running 10.4 code, plenty of BSD
# > machines and libpcap-fu.
# >
# > What I'm looking for is either a timed-average or moments-glance number
# > of the traffic.  For instance, on an interface moving 150mbit/sec total,
# > 50mbit/sec of it is attributed to Netflix right now.  I'm pretty handy with
# > RRDtool, so that isn't out of the question, either.
# >
# > I've really only spent dinnertime considering this, but have come up with
# > two potential approaches so far, and haven't actively investigated either
# > of them:
# >
# > * firewall terms and counters on the MX router + snmp
# > * writing a quick libpcap application to filter and count in a completely
# >  out-of-band way on one of my monitoring hosts
# >
# > Some challenges I can see:
# >
# > * Nailing down the streaming source for Netflix, that is, IP ranges etc.
# > * Making assumptions about CDN source IPs that could be used for something
# >  else, and further, should I care?
# >
# > Happy to hear thoughts about this, helpful or not!  I know Netflix
# > themselves
# > have probably done plenty of studies like this, but pretty likely not
# > limited
# > to my customer base.  Not aiming for anything creepy or crazy, just some
# > vague understanding of what's going on, and the ability to do some trending
# > for future planning.
# >
# > -- Jonathan Towne
# >
# >




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