EMZETT.Traffic
In short: Traffic is the data flow in a network or to a website: the amount of data transferred in a given time.
In more detail: It is measured as an amount of data (e.g. GB per month) or as a rate (e.g. Mbit/s). For websites, visitors and page views are also counted as traffic.
In Depth
- Incoming and outgoing: ingress (data arrives) and egress (data leaves). With hosting and cloud providers often only outgoing traffic is limited or charged.
- Utilisation: the traffic relative to the bandwidth. When the line is full, latency and packet loss rise.
- Peaks: at certain times (evenings, promotions, releases) traffic rises sharply. Servers must be designed for this, see load balancing.
- Good and bad: part of the traffic is people, part is bots (search engines, but also scrapers and attacks such as DDoS). Bot protection filters the unwanted part.
- Monitoring: routers, firewalls and monitoring tools show the traffic, also for troubleshooting and detecting attacks.