Track network interfaces experiencing periods of high or low traffic. See bottlenecked, misconfigured, or hardly used network interfaces.

Configure a Network Traffic Analysis interface traffic threshold:

  • Name. Used in the Threshold library and the title on the Alert Center Dashboard.
  • Notification Policy. (Optional) Select the notification policy to apply to this threshold. The policy initiates notifications when an item is outside the configured threshold limits.
  • Threshold Check Interval. Enter a time interval for Alert Center to check the Network Performance Monitor database for items that are out of the threshold limits.

    Automatically resolve items no longer out of threshold. Select this option if you want Alert Center to automatically resolve items when they return to the value within the threshold limit.

Note: Notification policies are optional for most thresholds. If you do not select a notification policy, no notifications are generated for the threshold, but a dashboard report listing the out of threshold items still appears on the Alert Center Home page.

Add Condition Rules

  • incoming/outgoing. Select the traffic direction(s) across the network interface (outgoing, incoming, incoming or outgoing) you want the threshold to consider.
  • Exceeds/Falls below. Select a boundary (Exceeds, Falls below) and either units or mode (%) of measurement.

    For example, you can configure threshold based on total volume observed in packets per second (pps), flows per second (fps), or bits per second (bps, Kbps, Mbps, and so on). Or you can configure threshold based percent utilization (%) of the network interface's nominal speed. In other words, the percent of traffic observed relative to the speed of the network interface (typically, this means the bandwidth capacity or nominal speed of the NIC).

    Important: You can set the target bandwidth to use the Exceeds threshold against the speed set in the Edit Interface Properties view.
  • for more than. Select a period and units for the measurement.
    Note: Configure the threshold check interval for a longer time than the Data Collection Interval for thresholds relating to trends, such as percent utilization. Configure it for a time the same as (or similar to) the sampling interval when configuring a threshold for a health check.
Tip: Avoid setting the threshold check interval to a very short time. Aggressive intervals can degrade system performance. In general, setting the threshold check interval to less than five minutes is not advised.

Select Applied Traffic

Traffic to Monitor. By default, this threshold is set to monitor traffic from all Network Traffic Analysis sources.

Select the Network Traffic Analysis source or interface from which to monitor traffic. When you select a source, traffic for all interfaces on the source is monitored. When you select an interface, only traffic for the selected interface is monitored.

Tip: When you select a source, traffic for all interfaces on the source is monitored. When you select an interface, only traffic for the selected interface is monitored.