Using Metrics

A metric is the statistic being reported on. The following metrics are available:

Bandwidth—The total bandwidth consumed by the selected services. By default, a bandwidth report is displayed as a stacked-area chart, where each area indicates the bandwidth used by a specific service.

When generating a bandwidth report, you can select the direction: upstream, downstream, or both.

You can also display an hourly average of bandwidth. This metrics is recommended when you are generating a report for many hours. In this case, a single data point per hour is sufficient: it reduces the quantity of data displayed, improving performance and the visualization of the data.

Volume—The total volume (in kilobytes or megabytes) for a specific period, for the selected service usage counters. As opposed to the bandwidth metric, which provides normalized volume over time, volume reports give the total volume consumed, grouped by specific time durations. By default, a volume report is displayed as a stacked-bar chart, where each bar/series indicates the volume of a specific service usage counter.

Volume reports give the accumulated usage either for specific durations of time (hours or days), or for the entire duration of the report. For example: a Global Hourly Usage Volume report displays a bar that accounts for the total volume consumed by each service usage counter during each hour of the selected time frame, and a Global Aggregated Usage Volume per Service report accounts for all volume of each service usage counter for the entire time frame of the report.

Sessions—The number of sessions. A session is a single network transaction (for example, RTSP stream or P2P file download). By default, a sessions report is displayed as a stacked-bar chart, where each bar/series indicates the total number of sessions of a specific service usage counter.

Similar to the volume reports, sessions reports can be grouped into specific durations (hours or days), to account for the total number of sessions in a specific hour/day consumed by a specific service usage counter.