Capacity Viewer Workflow

The Capacity Viewer in Planner helps you to view link utilization and simulate demands to evaluate how the network performs under different traffic conditions. It assesses an offline model, enabling you to determine whether capacity upgrades are needed without impacting the live network.

Capacity Viewer uses a baseline model which represents the current state of your network and reflects how it operates. The model includes network topology, routing behaviors, and demands that define how traffic flows across the network. The Links tab shows how network links are utilized over a selected date range, while the Demands tab displays demand values and lets you update them. By modifying demand values and calculating utilization, you can simulate different traffic scenarios and identify overutilized links. For more information, see About the Capacity Viewer Page.

To analyze link utilization and modify demands in your offline network model:

Import a live network with data. For more information, see Create a Network Model.
Open the network model.
On the Working Model page, select the model and click Open.
Click the Capacity Viewer button to view link utilization and modify demands in your network.
1. On the Links tab, to analyze link utilization:
  1. Select the Date Range to define the time period for analysis. You can choose a predefined range (one week or one month) or specify a custom range.
  2. Select the Statistics type. You can choose an option such as percentile (90th, 95th, 99th), average, maximum, or minimum
  3. Select the Aggregation Interval. You can choose an interval such as day or hour to define how frequently the data points are calculated and displayed.
  4. Click on Calculate Utilization and view the Link Utilization table to analyze utilization data for all links.
2. On the Demands tab, to modify demands:
  1. Enter a numeric value in the Modify New Bandwidth field.
  2. Choose how you want to modify the bandwidth (increase, decrease or set a value using percentage or units such as bps, Kbps, Mbps, or Gbps).
  3. Select the required demands or all demands from the table and click Apply Selected to apply the changes.
  4. (Optional) You can also edit the values directly in the New Bandwidth column to update the demand.
  5. Click on Update Demands to save the changes to the network model.
    
    You are redirected to the Path Computation page, where you can select the appropriate combination of tunnels and demands for path computation.
On the Path Computation page, select one of the following options:
- All (recommended)—Routing Director recomputes paths for all tunnels and demands.
- Only Unplaced—Routing Director recomputes paths only for newly-added tunnels and demands that do not have the current path information.
- None—Routing Director does not recompute paths; it only updates parameters, such as bandwidth, link utilization, and so on.
Click Submit.

The model is saved and the processing of the request to update the model begins.
Once the processing of the update model request has successfully finished, the Reload icon on the offline topology page is enabled. Click the Reload icon to apply the updates and view the network with the modified demands.

You can view the modified demands, simulate network element failures to gain insights into network resilience and performance impact, and view reports of the exhaustive and what-if scenarios. For more information see, Exhaustive Failure Simulation, What-If Failure Simulation and View Reports.

Capacity Viewer Workflow

Related Documentation