Windows Server 2008 Current Bandwidth Performance Monitor Scaling

network-monitoringperformance-monitoringwindows-server-2008

I've been looking over Microsoft's performance monitor documentation and the one thing I'm confused about is scaling. Is it purely just for viewing the data more easily?

I'm trying to view performance of my network card using the Current Bandwidth performance monitor. It's always at 100 and I was thinking I need to scale it to something proper but I'm not well versed on how scaling it effects the way the data is perceived.

How would I know which scale to pick? What I don't want is to think its on 10% load when it really is a different load.

Best Answer

The key to that particular counter is in the decription:

Current Bandwidth is an estimate of the current bandwidth of the network interface in bits per second (BPS). For interfaces that do not vary in bandwidth or for those where no accurate estimation can be made, this value is the nominal bandwidth.

For an Ethernet NIC, the second sentence in the description describes what you should see in perfmon:

For interfaces that do not vary in bandwidth or for those where no accurate estimation can be made, this value is the nominal bandwidth.

What you're probably looking for is bandwidth utilization, not bandwidth. Bandwidth is a measure of how much data can be placed on the interface (it's capacity in bps, Kbps, Mbps or Gbps), bandwidth utilization (usage) is a measure of how much of the available bandwidth is actually being utilized.

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