What Is Network Capacity?

• Network Capacity Definition

  Network Capacity Definition

  Network capacity refers to the maximum information transfer limit of a network at any given point. Whether you build a new network or perform a network refresh, maintaining sufficient capacity is essential to run uninterrupted business operations. Proper network capacity planning allows you to calculate the current resource usage, document resource capacity limits, and predict potential changes in demand. It also requires you to regularly monitor key performance metrics—such as network bandwidth and latency—to identify shortcomings or issues capable of affecting your network's availability or throughput in the long run. With proper capacity planning, you can also estimate the additional hardware, software, and workforce needed to manage your network operations in the near future.
• Network capacity key metrics

  Network capacity key metrics

  Outlined below are some of the key metrics organizations can track using network performance monitoring tools for capacity management: 

  Network bandwidth: Keeping an eye on bandwidth utilization trends over different time intervals is crucial to determine your future network bandwidth needs. Network monitoring tools can help you track the bandwidth usage of wired and wireless devices through dashboard visualizations and data-rich reports. Analyzing the current and historical bandwidth usage reports can help you decide whether an increase in bandwidth capacity is required.

  CPU and memory utilization: Tracking the CPU and memory usage of different infrastructure components—such as servers and laptops—is crucial for network capacity planning. Reliable network performance monitoring tools can help you quickly determine the applications, devices, or processes consuming excessive CPU and memory resources. They allow you to easily compare the CPU and memory usage of different network devices on a unified dashboard. Network monitoring tools can also generate detailed reports to help you track CPU utilization, temperature, speed, and other key performance metrics. You can use these reports for trend analysis and network capacity planning. 

  Network latency and throughput: Network latency and throughput are two critical metrics you can measure and analyze using network tools to establish performance and capacity baselines. A latency test using network management software helps determine the delay users experience while transferring or receiving data over your network. Similarly, measuring throughput allows you to identify your network's actual data transfer rate. Performing these critical tests helps you identify potential shortcomings capable of affecting your network performance in the long run. 

  Network jitter and packet loss: Network tools can help you understand more about the traffic flows in your network through metrics such as jitter and packet loss. A network jitter test enables you to track the incongruity in packet delay at the receiver's end. Furthermore, the packet loss metric highlights the number of data packets lost during network transmission. Regularly tracking these two traffic metrics is crucial for accurate network capacity planning.
• Network capacity alerting

  Network capacity alerting

  Network capacity alerting notifies network administrators when key network performance indicators exceed their set thresholds. As these network alerts are designed to provide quick information on network degradation issues, network engineers can detect, analyze, and resolve issues faster.

  How Do Network Alerts Work?

  Network alerts work by constantly monitoring the network to detect performance-related issues across the network. You can set alerts based on different trigger conditions. Common critical network conditions that trigger alerts include response time delays, capacity exhaustion, high latency levels, overloaded servers, outages, exceeding critical thresholds, and high CPU or memory utilization. Alerts are sent to network admins via email, text, or other modes of communication for faster troubleshooting. Delay in detecting and solving network problems can lead to unwanted issues, including significant downtime, security risks, employee inefficiency, and potential financial losses.

  Organizations need to determine their network priorities and focus on alerts highlighting critical issues, such as capacity exhaustion. Network admins can use an automated network performance monitoring tool to get a detailed and advanced approach to network alerting. Some tools use topology-aware network alerts to reveal the root cause of the problem. This helps diagnose and resolve problems faster.
• Network capacity forecasting

  Network capacity forecasting

  Overuse of network capacity may negatively impact business-critical applications and operational efficiency within an organization. Network capacity forecasting helps monitor capacity utilization and predicts resources required to keep up with the changes in network infrastructure. It allows network engineers to avoid network congestion and outages caused by capacity exhaustion.

  Capacity forecasting helps to predict a network's needs by analyzing critical device capacity usage based on peak and average usage. The following two common calculation methods forecast capacity exhaustion at the node, interface, and volume level:

  • Peak calculation: This method forecasts capacity usage trends based on daily maximum values. It’s used for critical devices and connections to avoid overutilization of capacity.

  • Average calculation: This method relies on daily average values to forecast capacity usage. It’s used for network devices or connections where high capacity usage for a short duration is admissible.

  Once aware of the average or daily peak capacity usage, network engineers can customize capacity thresholds to calculate capacity exhaustion dates and add resources based on network demands.

  Network reporting for capacity planning

  Network reports provide detailed information on the overall network performance. These reports contain meaningful data related to the current state of the network and historical data around different network-related statistics, including throughput, node, interface availability, device availability, and other device-specific metrics. Network reports can provide insights on future network performance trends and capacity needs. This further helps organizations make better IT decisions related to capacity additions, device replacements, and other upgrades. Organizations can use automated network monitoring tools to generate service-level agreements (SLAs) for availability, response time, and other criteria. These tools can also generate custom reports for specific departments within an organization.
• Network capacity planning benefits

  Network capacity planning benefits

  Improved bandwidth management: Network capacity planning tools provide valuable metrics to help you easily track the bandwidth usage of different devices or applications in your network. You can easily view and compare the bandwidth utilization of network devices and interfaces through the interactive charts and graphs these tools generate. They can also help you track changes in bandwidth utilization month over month to accurately predict your future bandwidth needs and help you avoid unnecessary network slowdowns.

  Better load management: Proper network capacity planning allows you to track the CPU load, temperature, and memory utilization of different network components over time for proper load management. Excessive stress on the CPU of a network device can increase latency or even cause device failure. Similarly, memory overutilization by a network component can result in improper traffic routing, resulting in network slowdown. Being aware of CPU and memory utilization trends is essential to maintain adequate resource capacity and prevent unexpected network failures.

  Improved user experience: The network jitter or delay due to suboptimal network bandwidth can result in unavailability or slowdown of mission-critical services, such as VoIP and streaming applications. This decreases employee productivity and customer satisfaction. Proactive and accurate capacity planning helps you maintain sufficient network resources so you can avoid these issues and deliver a great experience to end users.
• Capacity planning as part of network monitoring and management

  Capacity planning as part of network monitoring and management

  How does network capacity planning work as part of network performance monitoring and management?

  Network capacity planning is based on the analysis of data gathered during network performance monitoring and management. Network performance management focuses on analyzing key network performance indicators, including packet loss rate, bandwidth utilization, capacity usage, and hardware-related metrics such as temperature, fan speed, and power supply.

  Network administrators use automated network performance monitoring tools to identify significant capacity issues. These tools monitor trends for interface utilization, disk usage, memory capacity, and CPU load for critical devices within the network. This data helps you calculate baseline thresholds to reveal capacity issues. A network performance monitoring tool can analyze specific nodes within the network to gain current and projected capacity usage data and forecast data. Additionally, network engineers can improve the overall operational efficiency of an organization with easy-to-use dashboards, network alerts, and intuitive reports that are a part of network software.

  Some tools also allow the evaluation of wireless network capacity alongside wired devices with alerts and reports. For wireless network capacity usage, tools automatically recognize wireless APs and controllers as wireless devices. This helps manage wireless and autonomous access points and their associated clients. Network engineers can also generate wireless network management reports with detailed data on wireless availability, average and peak number of clients, and so forth. They can use these insights for better planning and management of network resources to avoid capacity exhaustion.