5 Tips to Streamline Capacity Planning and Optimize Bandwidth Usage in the Enterprise

Belinda Yung-Rubke

Today’s network managers are tasked with two conflicting business directives when it comes to network performance. The first is to ensure the delivery of an optimal end-user experience on the network, and the second is to reduce the operational costs of the network. To help meet these challenges, Fluke Networks is providing five tips to streamline capacity planning and optimize bandwidth usage in the enterprise.

With the network under more and more stress as video, VoIP, virtualization, VDI, wireless and more, all fight for bandwidth, understanding the right time and reasons to increase throughput is key.

Here are five areas to consider when tackling this challenge:

1. Understand Bandwidth Resources and Performance Tradeoffs

Bad performance does not necessarily mean that bandwidth is not sufficient. Knowing how busy links are, and for how long, is key to gauging the correlation between bandwidth and performance. Under-utilized links can drain bandwidth resources by using up valuable budget that could be allocated to other over-utilized links. Keep in mind that network bursting is normal, it just needs to be within proper thresholds.

2. Use the Right Tools for the Job

Trying to detect over-utilization of bandwidth can be difficult when the tools are not well suited to the job. Viewing a long-term trend of usage flattens out peaks of high utilization, thus hiding true problems. Peak utilization views show when links are the busiest, but do not indicate for how long. Traffic totals per-day, per-month, etc., can show general growth, but ignore the differences between different times of day. The key questions to answer are: has the link been over-utilized, for how long, and by what application and what end-user?

3. Account for Business Hours

While a network link might be busy during the night or weekend while backup and software updates are performed, it may be acceptable during the business day when staff is working. Do not let evening and night data cloud your view of utilization. Having a combination of real-time and back-in-time views allows IT to see what is happening more quickly, solve problems faster, and move on to more strategic initiatives efficiently.

4. Is Bandwidth Being Used for Business?

There are two types of traffic, business and recreational. Obviously, business has priority, so it is important to know why a busy link is busy. Is it usage of a business application? Is it the breaking news story everyone is streaming to the desktop? Even if it is a business application causing congestion, does that application really need to consume that much bandwidth? Or, is the bandwidth being used by old rogue applications that IT needs to remove from the network? (Efficient application design and WAN optimization are also examples of strategic decisions that should be considered alongside the tactical approach of bandwidth needs.)

5. Streamline the Job

With networks growing quickly, the job of understanding what links are busy, when and why, gets more complex and time consuming. The amount of time taken to perform proactive capacity planning is the main reason why the job does not get done. Do not waste time looking at links that do not require attention. Focus on those critical few links that are busiest for the most amount of time. Use customized alerting that can show when bandwidth hits 80 percent for a rolling three minutes, and be prepared to react.

Belinda Yung-Rubke is Director of Field Marketing for Fluke Networks.

Related Links:

www.flukenetworks.com

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5 Tips to Streamline Capacity Planning and Optimize Bandwidth Usage in the Enterprise

Belinda Yung-Rubke

Today’s network managers are tasked with two conflicting business directives when it comes to network performance. The first is to ensure the delivery of an optimal end-user experience on the network, and the second is to reduce the operational costs of the network. To help meet these challenges, Fluke Networks is providing five tips to streamline capacity planning and optimize bandwidth usage in the enterprise.

With the network under more and more stress as video, VoIP, virtualization, VDI, wireless and more, all fight for bandwidth, understanding the right time and reasons to increase throughput is key.

Here are five areas to consider when tackling this challenge:

1. Understand Bandwidth Resources and Performance Tradeoffs

Bad performance does not necessarily mean that bandwidth is not sufficient. Knowing how busy links are, and for how long, is key to gauging the correlation between bandwidth and performance. Under-utilized links can drain bandwidth resources by using up valuable budget that could be allocated to other over-utilized links. Keep in mind that network bursting is normal, it just needs to be within proper thresholds.

2. Use the Right Tools for the Job

Trying to detect over-utilization of bandwidth can be difficult when the tools are not well suited to the job. Viewing a long-term trend of usage flattens out peaks of high utilization, thus hiding true problems. Peak utilization views show when links are the busiest, but do not indicate for how long. Traffic totals per-day, per-month, etc., can show general growth, but ignore the differences between different times of day. The key questions to answer are: has the link been over-utilized, for how long, and by what application and what end-user?

3. Account for Business Hours

While a network link might be busy during the night or weekend while backup and software updates are performed, it may be acceptable during the business day when staff is working. Do not let evening and night data cloud your view of utilization. Having a combination of real-time and back-in-time views allows IT to see what is happening more quickly, solve problems faster, and move on to more strategic initiatives efficiently.

4. Is Bandwidth Being Used for Business?

There are two types of traffic, business and recreational. Obviously, business has priority, so it is important to know why a busy link is busy. Is it usage of a business application? Is it the breaking news story everyone is streaming to the desktop? Even if it is a business application causing congestion, does that application really need to consume that much bandwidth? Or, is the bandwidth being used by old rogue applications that IT needs to remove from the network? (Efficient application design and WAN optimization are also examples of strategic decisions that should be considered alongside the tactical approach of bandwidth needs.)

5. Streamline the Job

With networks growing quickly, the job of understanding what links are busy, when and why, gets more complex and time consuming. The amount of time taken to perform proactive capacity planning is the main reason why the job does not get done. Do not waste time looking at links that do not require attention. Focus on those critical few links that are busiest for the most amount of time. Use customized alerting that can show when bandwidth hits 80 percent for a rolling three minutes, and be prepared to react.

Belinda Yung-Rubke is Director of Field Marketing for Fluke Networks.

Related Links:

www.flukenetworks.com

Hot Topics

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Enterprises are under pressure to scale AI quickly. Yet despite considerable investment, adoption continues to stall. One of the most overlooked reasons is vendor sprawl ... In reality, no organization deliberately sets out to create sprawling vendor ecosystems. More often, complexity accumulates over time through well-intentioned initiatives, such as enterprise-wide digital transformation efforts, point solutions, or decentralized sourcing strategies ...

Cold Data, Hot Problem: Why AI Is Rewriting Enterprise Storage Strategy

Nearly every conversation about AI eventually circles back to compute. GPUs dominate the headlines while cloud platforms compete for workloads and model benchmarks drive investment decisions. But underneath that noise, a quieter infrastructure challenge is taking shape. The real bottleneck in enterprise AI is not processing power, it is the ability to store, manage and retrieve the relentless volumes of data that AI systems generate, consume and multiply ...

Observability at a Crossroads: AI, Economics, Complexity and the Enduring Power of Open Source

The 2026 Observability Survey from Grafana Labs paints a vivid picture of an industry maturing fast, where AI is welcomed with careful conditions, SaaS economics are reshaping spending decisions, complexity remains a defining challenge, and open standards continue to underpin it all ...

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The observability industry has an evolving relationship with AI. We're not skeptics, but it's clear that trust in AI must be earned ... In Grafana Labs' annual Observability Survey, 92% said they see real value in AI surfacing anomalies before they cause downtime. Another 91% endorsed AI for forecasting and root cause analysis. So while the demand is there, customers need it to be trustworthy, as the survey also found that the practitioners most enthusiastic about AI are also the most insistent on explainability ...

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AI workloads require an enormous amount of computing power ... What's also becoming abundantly clear is just how quickly AI's computing needs are leading to enterprise systems failure. According to Cockroach Labs' State of AI Infrastructure 2026 report, enterprise systems are much closer to failure than their organizations realize. The report ... suggests AI scale could cause widespread failures in as little as one year — making it a clear risk for business performance and reliability.

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