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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

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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

The Latest

AI is becoming the operating system of the enterprise. It acts as an invisible coordination layer that understands intent, connects systems, and executes work across complex SaaS environments. Previously, employees had to click through multiple systems — CRM, ERP, support tools, collaboration platforms — to complete a single task. Now, instead of navigating each application manually, they can simply state what they need to accomplish ...

In 2026, the cost of downtime or an outage is no longer just a technical inconvenience; it's a $600 billion wake up call for global businesses. As our digital ecosystems become  more interconnected, each touchpoint introduces new risks and multiplies the consequences when things go wrong. And the data is clear: aggregate downtime costs  for Global 2,000 companies have surged 50% since 2024, reaching a staggering $600 billion ...

Deloitte found that 74% of enterprises expect to deploy agentic AI solutions in the next 24 months. However, the rush to deployment is outpacing foundational work, though. Only 21% of enterprises have fully formed agent governance models in place. The result? AI agents deployed without guidance or governance begin to function as fragmented islands of complexity ...

Cloud spending is no longer viewed as a passthrough IT expense, but as a strategic financial lever that directly impacts innovation capacity, profitability and enterprise resilience, according to the CFO Cloud Cost Optimization Report from Azul ...

As AI moves from generating responses to performing actions, the need for trust increases exponentially. And as organizations enlist AI agents for increasingly sophisticated business processes, trust is going to be the single most important theme for spurring adoption. What can organizations do to build trustworthy AI agents? ...

I've spent a lot of time in the channel, and one thing I keep coming back to is this: a partner program is only as good as what it looks like in the field. Many programs look great on paper, but when a partner is in front of a customer navigating a complex hybrid environment or trying to make the case for AI-powered observability, the gap between what a vendor promises and what it actually delivers becomes very clear, very fast ...

Enterprises today operate in a real-time environment where uninterrupted access to trusted data has become a baseline expectation for users, applications and automated systems. Traditional DataOps models, built on manual effort and human triage, cannot keep pace with this always active demand. AI agents are emerging as the operational backbone, ensuring consistent data availability, reinforcing trustworthiness and enabling a level of scale that manual processes cannot achieve ...

For decades, trust in the digital workplace rested on familiar signals. We trusted faces on video calls, voices on the phone, and emails that appeared to come from people we knew. These cues felt human and intuitive. They anchored how decisions were made, approvals were granted, and access was authorized. AI-powered deepfakes have quietly broken that model ...

Cloud migration was supposed to be a one-way door. For most enterprises, it turns out it isn't. Cloud data repatriation is a real and growing trend. A new survey ... finds that 89% of organizations plan to expand their on-premises infrastructure footprint over the next two years — and 75% have already moved at least some workloads back from public cloud in the past 24 months. The findings point to a broad rethinking of where data belongs ...

Over the past few years, large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized the software industry. Given their ability to excel at multi-step reasoning, LLMs have helped enterprises streamline workflows and adapt to the unknown. However, employing such models comes with sky-high costs, latency issues, and limited flexibility. In the realm of IT operations, it is generally wiser to employ smaller, domain-specific models instead ...