Link capacity upgrade threshold

Thu Sep 3 05:50:59 UTC 2009

What SNMP MIB records drops?  I poked around for a short time, and I'm
thinking that generically the drops fall into the errors counter.  Hopefully
that's not the case.

Frank

-----Original Message-----
From: Kevin Graham [mailto:kgraham at industrial-marshmallow.com] 
Sent: Wednesday, September 02, 2009 1:32 AM
To: Bill Woodcock; nanog
Subject: Re: Link capacity upgrade threshold

> So, in summary: Your dropped packet counters are the ones to be looking at

> as a measure of goodput, more than your utilization counters. 

Indeed. Capacity upgrades are best gauged by drop rates; bit-rates without
this context are largely useless.

When you're only aware of the RX side though, in the absence of an
equivalent
to BECN, what's the best way to track this? Do any of the Ethernet OAM
standards expose this data?

Similarly, could anyone share experiences with transit link upgrades to
accommodate bursts? In the past, any requests to transit providers have
been answered w/ the need for significant increases to 95%ile commits.
While this makes sense from a sales perspective, there's a strong (but
insufficient) engineering argument against it.