My provider is billing my bandwidth using the 95-percentile method.
I know what it is in principle (take measurements, throw the top 5% away and use the remaining highest as result).
The question here is what is used as base data!
It is my understanding that with my current provider the switch logs the traffic per 5-minute interval. Not a single measurement every 5 minutes but the 5 minute average!
Is interval standardized or at least a de-facto standard in the industry?
Is it also standard to use the average bandwith (wich equals data devided by time) during those intervals or just take for example a 5 sec average every 5 minutes?
My second question is: Is there an application, like vnstat, which I can use to measure the 95-percentile myself?
Best Answer
The standard I Know is simply to look at the network counters (Transmitted packets / bytes) per 5 minutes. Simple as that - this give you average as you dont know how that was distributed over the 5 minutes.
Basically measure bytes / packets sent / received counters from network equipment every 5 minutes. That is 100%. Throw away the 5% highest numbers, that is the 95% percentile.
Measuring yourself - yes, but getting exactly the same numbers is hard (need to measure the same elements exactly at same time).