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Is anyone aware of a good way to limit overages due to 95/5 burstable billing by capping a server's bandwidth once it gets close to having large peaks more than 5% of the time during the month?

I'm guessing a cron job could be used to poll the output of /proc/net/dev every minute to get data transfer rates for each minute and then based on that use iptables or something to limit the bandwidth until the end of the month if certain thresholds are crossed. I wondering though if there's some preexisting tool/way to do this rather than writing something from scratch.

sa289
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  • `rrdtool create foo.rrd` then `rrdtool update foo.rrd [value]` finally `rrdtool fetch foo.rrd [math]` http://oss.oetiker.ch/rrdtool/doc/rrdtool.en.html – Sammitch Sep 12 '15 at 00:43

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I'd suggest doing the math or asking your provider for their monitoring information.

You need to observe your patterns and adjust accordingly. For instance, if you're copying data from a source that has a faster connection than you, you'll saturate your link and run the right of a higher 5% utilization. So perhaps you rate-limit transfers from that location.

Also see: What does it mean - to get billed to the 95th percentile at $x.xx per meg?

Community
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ewwhite
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  • Yeah, I'm sure we could create something. I guess I was hoping there was some tool already which would engage rate limiting automatically to adhere to a targeted 95% usage, but allow for bursting in the other 5%. – sa289 Sep 12 '15 at 18:08