| 1 | ### Understand the alert |
| 2 | |
| 3 | Network interfaces are categorized primarily on the bandwidth rate at which they can operate (1 Gbps, 10 Gbps, etc). High network utilization occurs when the volume of data on a network link approaches the capacity of the link. Netdata Agent calculates the average outbound utilization for a specific network interface over the last minute. High outbound utilization increases latency and packet loss because packet bursts are buffered. |
| 4 | |
| 5 | This alarm may indicate either a network congestion or malicious activity. |
| 6 | |
| 7 | ### Troubleshoot the alert |
| 8 | |
| 9 | - Prioritize important traffic |
| 10 | |
| 11 | Quality of service (QoS) is the use of mechanisms or technologies to control traffic and ensure the performance of critical applications. QoS works best when low-priority traffic exists that can be dropped when congestion occurs. The higher-priority traffic must fit within the bandwidth limitations of the link or path. |
| 12 | |
| 13 | - Add more bandwidth |
| 14 | |
| 15 | - For **Cloud infrastructures**, adding bandwidth might be easy. It depends on your cloud infrastracture and your cloud provider. Some of them either offer you the service to upgrade machines to a higher bandwidth rate or upgrade you machine to a more powerful one with higher bandwidth rate. |
| 16 | |
| 17 | - For **Bare-metal** machines, you will need either a hardware upgrade or the addition of a network card using link aggregation to combine multiple network connections in parallel (e.g LACP). |
| 18 | |
| 19 | ### Useful resources |
| 20 | |
| 21 | - [FireQOS](https://firehol.org/tutorial/fireqos-new-user/) is a traffic shaping helper. It has a very simple shell scripting language to express traffic shaping. |
| 22 | |
| 23 | - [`tcconfig`](https://tcconfig.readthedocs.io/en/latest/index.html) is a command wrapper that makes it easy to set up traffic control of network bandwidth/latency/packet-loss/packet-corruption/etc. |