Recent improvement in the communication and broadband technology has made ISP’s to offer better billing model to their customers based on their bandwidth usage. ISP’s have their own standard technology to bill the customers which is billing based on 95th percentile. Some of the ISP’s do offer billing based on the 90th percentile to attract customers, but as of now the industrial standard of billing the bandwidth usage is based on 95th percentile.
In this blog, we are going to have brief look on 95th percentile, NetFlow Analyzer reports with 95th percentile calculation and billing reports based on 95th percentile in NetFlow Analyzer.
95th Percentile :-
The 95th percentile is the standard of billing model and it has a specific meaning. In order to calculate the traffic rate for which you will be billed, ISP sorts the samples taken during your billing period, then ignores the highest five percent of those samples.
Traffic Graph of NetFlow Analyzer.
NetFlow Analyzer calculates and displays 95th percentile for the interfaces and IP groups. Given below are some example how NetFlow Analyzer calculates and shows the 95th percentile for both IN and OUT traffic.
In the following screen shot for the time period of 20 minutes, there is about 20 data points(1 minute granularity) for both IN and OUT. These data points for both IN and OUT are separately sorted in a descending order to calculate the 95th Percentile.
Given below is the calculation which shows how 95th Percentile is derived for the IN traffic, for the OUT traffic the methodology is same as IN traffic.
IN Data Points = (114.06, 137.09, 159.53, 159.6, 160.06, 182.24, 182.45, 182.75, 205.06, 205.74, 227.96, 228.33, 228.39,228.71, 228.76, 250.98, 251.11, 251.4, 251.74, 273.87 )
Now the data points gathered are sorted in decesending order as below,
INData Points = (273.87, 251.7,251.4, 251.11, 250.98, 228.76, 228.71, 228.39, 228.33, 227.96, 205.75, 205.06, 182.75, 182.45, 182.24, 160.06, 159.6, 159.53, 137.09, 114.06)
From this 20 data points the top 5% of the point is been ignored and the one next is considered as 95th percentile IN. The data point ignored is 273.87 and the 95th Percentile is 251.7
NetFlow Analyzer traffic graphs are based on 1 minute granularity, the above example calculation for the 95th percentile is for traffic graph on NetFlow Analyzer which is based on 1 minute granularity. NetFlow Analyzer have billing functionality which is peculiarly designed for ISP and Enterprise to bill their users and customers based on their usage.
Billing Reports on NetFlow Analyzer:-
NetFlow Analyzer offers a functionality to users and ISP to bill the departments / clients based on their usage. For this, we need to create a bill plan on NetFlow Analyzer and associate the interfaces or IP group to the bill plan. Once the bill plan is created, NetFlow Analyzer gathers the traffic usage of the interface or IP group associated to bill plan for the billing period and generates the billing report based on the 95th percentile. The one important thing being that billing reports in NetFlow Analyzer is based on 5 minute granularity for the whole billing period. In the billing module, you can select the opiton to generate billing report based on 95th percentile combined for both IN and OUT traffic or separately.
Below given is an example screen shot of NetFlow Analyzer billing report based on 95th Percentile by merging IN and OUT.
Thanks
Praveen Kumar
NetFlow Analyzer Technical Team
Interactive Demo | Product overview video | Twitter | Customers
