Symptoms: Network utilization levels are above threshold
Impact: Medium
Slow SQL responses will degrade the user experience, resulting in poor efficiency of your organization’s operations.
Expected behavior :
There is no standard metric for network activity. Many aspects of the environment will affect the network load.
This threshold measures usage level in percentage of network bandwidth transfer from/to server.
Possible causes
High network traffic – system Priority: Medium
Unusual levels of traffic may be coming from external operations (backups, restores, etc from networked data stores)
Recommended action :
Where possible, concentrate non-SQL Server related activities onto a separate network. Also, schedule high-volume activities to time frames of lowest user demand.
SQL queries with high disk I/O requiring data traffic to storage Priority: Medium
This problem is specifically relevant to environments with networked storage.
Recommended action :
If possible, log storage disks should be physically linked to the server, or over a separate network. To otherwise minimize traffic, see our recommendations regarding page file optimization here.
Network errors or inefficient network structure Priority: Medium
Faulty or inadequate hardware components, such as routers, controllers etc. with low bandwidth capabilities can significantly slow down traffic.
Recommended action :
Investigate all hardware components, with your Network Management team.
See our recommendations regarding network latency here.
Background
This measure of traffic is closely associated with network latency. See here.