Hello, I have a Droplet 48 GB Memory / 50 GB Disk / SFO2 running for my production site, I configured alerts with default values for CPU, Memory, Disk and also Bandwidth Speed (above 70.00 Mbps for 5 minutes). I received a few alerts saying that, for example “Network Transmit Bytes for droplet xxxx is currently at 441.67 Mbps, above setting of 70.00 Mbps… etc”. I was wondering: what does this metric really mean and should I be worried about those “peaks”? and, why I’m receiving and email alert when according to the Monitoring Tab, no alerts have been triggered and according to the graphs, the peaks are way below the 70.00 Mbps mark?
Alert Policies
Name Last Alert
CPU is running high . Never
CPU is above 70% for 10 min
Bandwidth — Outbound is running high Never Bandwidth — Outbound is above 70Mbps for 5 min
Bandwidth — Inbound is running high Bandwidth — Inbound is above 71Mbps for 5 min Never
Disk — Read is running high Never Disk — Read is above 75MB/s for 5 min
Memory Utilization is running high . Never Memory Utilization is above 70% for 5 min
I hope this makes sense! :)
This textbox defaults to using Markdown to format your answer.
You can type !ref in this text area to quickly search our full set of tutorials, documentation & marketplace offerings and insert the link!
Hi @callard,
It would seem you’ve had a huge traffic spike during that time. If we say it’s legit traffic then maybe had some advertisement for your website or maybe you’ve launched a new product. Another thing I’ve seen is when you’ve send a newsletter to your clients and they’ve all opened the website.
Now the more probable cause. Most probably someone attacked you with a small DDoS. Having said that, your droplet is quite powerful so that’s why you didn’t actually experienced downtime. If this is a one time event you shouldn’t give more thought to it.
Now, if this is happening on a daily basis, I’ll recommend you to check your access_logs and netstat to see how many IP addresses are actually connected to the droplet and what requests are they performing.
Kind regards, Kalin
Become a contributor for community
Get paid to write technical tutorials and select a tech-focused charity to receive a matching donation.
DigitalOcean Documentation
Full documentation for every DigitalOcean product.
Resources for startups and AI-native businesses
The Wave has everything you need to know about building a business, from raising funding to marketing your product.
The developer cloud
Scale up as you grow — whether you're running one virtual machine or ten thousand.
Get started for free
Sign up and get $200 in credit for your first 60 days with DigitalOcean.*
*This promotional offer applies to new accounts only.