You can view graphs showing the most recent site serving capacity, utilization percentage, and traffic levels for each of your embedded sites from the home page in the Partner Portal. You can also view additional details and a historical view in the Site Capacity Reports.
In this article:
- Notes on the site capacity model
- Interpreting site capacity and utilization
- OCA Site Capacity reports
Notes on the site capacity model
- Site Capacity is defined as the maximum throughput (in Gbps) that can be served from the clustered set of OCAs within an embedded site before traffic needs to shed to another site.
- Utilization is calculated by comparing site capacity to recent peak traffic served from the site.
- Our capacity model considers many factors such as OCA hardware and software limitations, potential offload based on catalog size for the region, and so on. Therefore, you may see less serving capacity than what might be predicted based on connected NIC ports and interface speed alone.
- In small sites with 1 or 2 OCAs, these limiting factors may be more pronounced.
- It is normal to see slight fluctuations in site capacity from week to week. These fluctuations can occur due to changes in title popularity, content placement, or encoding strategies.
- Capacity values are updated weekly. Refer to the "last updated" date to understand when the data was last refreshed. This delay is necessary because capacity and peak traffic are calculated based on the summed bits from the peak hour of traffic for each day, and highest peak can only be determined after the day ends.
Interpreting site capacity and utilization
Generally, we recommend that average traffic levels for a site remain below 75% of the site's capacity. If you see some sites in the report that are running consistently at or above 75%, action may be warranted. However, the impact of a site running above the typical desired capacity percentage will depend on your particular network design - whether you have sufficient backup capacity in nearby peering or embedded sites, how high overall traffic levels are in each site, and so on.
It may be useful to look at site capacity and utilization in conjunction with the high level traffic patterns displayed in the Traffic by AS Path report to determine what solutions might work best for your network.
If an embedded site is running consistently above the 75% threshold, consider these options:
- If the site capacity graphs indicate that additional capacity can be achieved by connecting additional ports, consider connecting more ports where possible. You can view connected and disconnected ports on the Overview diagram for each OCA.
- If you have embedded or peering sites in a similar geographic area where one or more site(s) are running above 75% and others are running below, consider modifying your BGP announcements to re-route some amount traffic from the over-utilized site(s) to the under-utilized site(s).
- If neither of these solutions are applicable, the solution might be to augment over-utilized sites with additional OCAs. To discuss this option with your PEM, or for assistance troubleshooting over-utilized sites, you can open a ticket using the ticket issue type "Capacity / Additional OCA or PNI".
OCA Site Capacity reports
Reports
There are two detailed capacity reports available:
OCA Site Capacity (1 week)
This report displays port capacity vs. average traffic levels for a given week (Monday - Sunday). There are two charts in the report: Overall capacity and traffic levels for your organization, and a per-site view. If there are some ports on OCAs in the site that are not connected, and if connecting these ports would provide additional serving capacity, the charts include an additional value for the potential capacity that could be added to the site by connecting additional ports. More information below.
OCA Site Capacity (Historical)
This report shows a similar set of data over a longer period. Use this report to look at trends or consistency over time.
Note: New reports are published in the middle of the week, for the week ending the previous Sunday. For example, reports for the week ending Sunday November 15th will be available approximately on Wednesday, November 18th.
What do we mean by capacity "with additional ports"?
We do some calculations to determine whether and by how much each OCA would be able to increase its serving capacity if additional ports were connected. The chart will show an additional "with additional ports" value for the site if the site contains one or more OCAs that meet the following criteria:
- The OCA reaches a high % capacity on most days
- The OCA's capacity is usually limited by the number of connected NICs
- The OCA will see a significant increase in capacity if additional ports are connected
Running the reports
- Open Metrics > Reports from the main menu.
- In the panel that opens, select the OCA Site Capacity (1 week) or OCA Site Capacity (Historical) report, select options, and click Submit.
The report runs and results are displayed in the right panel.