### Understand the alert

Network interfaces are categorized primarily on the bandwidth 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

This alarm may indicate either network congestion or malicious activity.

### Troubleshoot the alert

- Prioritize important traffic

Quality of service (QoS) is the use of routing prioritization 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. 

- Add more bandwidth

  - 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.

  - 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).

### Useful resources

- [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.

- [`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.