What is The 95th Percentile Bandwidth Metering?
Publisher: Psychz Networks, December 04,2018Network capacity planning and billing are one of the trickiest parts for the companies to generate reports to monitor bandwidth utilization.
In most of the cases, where the payment methods are based on fixed or actual data transferred, any erratic spike in bandwidth usage which is also known as bursting is either forbidden or fined with greater bills.
To deal with this kind of situation, the 95th percentile bandwidth method plays a vital role. There are a couple of other common methodologies for bandwidth metering that commonly seen in the Internet world. Each having its own application for specific types of services, 95th percentile offers an alternative to fixed or actual data transferred payment methods.
So, what is 95th Percentile Metering?
With the 95th percentile bandwidth measuring method, a customer can pay for what they utilize instead of opting for a bandwidth cap subscription.
The 95th Percentile method states that the total usage of bandwidth is close to or below the specified amount, 95% of the time. The remaining 5% of the time, the usage can be higher than the specified amount. The highest 5% measured bandwidth represent bursts of traffic that are discarded and not used.
The 95th Percentile represents the value that your bandwidth is at or under 95% of the time. This value should not be mistaken for the mean or average.
The data is recorded after a regular interval of a few minutes. This data is then collected for over a month and is arranged in order of higher to lower usage. The top 5% of the data is then ignored. The subsequent highest data showing after that becomes the 95th percentile average.
What are the benefits of the 95th Percentile metering method?
The 95th percentile billing standard is the most fair for hosts as well as clients and, best suits for most of the dedicated and collocation customers.
The 95th percentile rates do not follow the method of billing compared to the GB usage billing which is based on total transfer during the month. GB billing is recommended for enterprise level users who have consistently higher levels of usage. The 95th percentile standard tracks bandwidth at peak utilization and then ignores the top 5% of the utilization peaks for billing purposes. This way the customers can pay for what they use (to some extent) rather than having a bandwidth cap applied.
At Psychz Networks, our dedicated and colocation server accounts are metered and billed on an Mbit scale normalized on the 95th percentile billing standard.
Your billable usage is determined based upon the highest remaining usage plotted on the graph. If your usage is equal to or lower than your committed bandwidth after we've taken off the top 5%, you will not receive any additional billing.
Our bandwidth system checks your server’s usage every few minutes at the port level and collects that data as a sample. This sample is stored in a database for later usage calculation. The samples are taken from the network switch port which services your equipment and are added together to provide the sampling totals.
At the end of each month, the sampled throughput values, which are based on the captured samples, are all listed out and sorted from lowest to highest, and the top 5% of the readings (the highest 5% of the values) are thrown out to get the 95th percentile usage reading. Unlike some of our other billing methods, where the bill is generated based on a 30-day calendar month no matter how many days there actually are in the month, our bandwidth billing system uses true month figures, i.e. 30 days in September or 31 days in March.