Impact of micro burst
Microbursts are patterns or spikes of traffic that take
place in a relatively short time interval(generally sub-second) causing network
interfaces to temporarily become oversubscribed and DROP traffic. While bursty
traffic is fairly common in networks and in most cases is handled by buffers,
in some cases the spike in traffic is more than the buffer and interface can
handle.
Typical monitoring
systems pull interface traffic statistics every one or five minutes by
default. In most cases this gives you a
good view into what is going on in your network on the interface level for any
traffic patterns that are relatively consistent. Unfortunately this doesn’t allow you to see
bursty traffic that occurs in any short time interval less than the one you are
graphing.
The first place you might notice you are experiencing bursty
traffic is in the interface statistics on your switch under “Total Output
Drops”.
R2#sh int f0/0 | inc Input
Input queue: 0/75/0/0
(size/max/drops/flushes); Total output drops: 7228
If you are seeing output drops increment, but the overall
traffic utilization of that interface is otherwise low, you are most likely
experiencing some type of bursty traffic.
