Utilization Meter Dial Appears Maxed Despite Low Readout

Products

• Network Observability

Issue/Introduction

The customer reports that the utilization meter dial appears to be maxed out, even though the numeric readout is low (e.g., 7%).
Example: The gauge needle is near the upper limit, but the displayed value is only 7%.

Question: Do we need to modify the maximum limit in the Utilization meter?

Environment

DX NetOps Performance Management All releases

Resolution

This behaviour is expected in most cases and does not require changes to the configuration.

• Many utilization meters are not tied to true percentages.
• The min and max values of the gauge can be:
  • User-defined, or
  • Automatically calculated from the available data range (dynamic scaling).
• This results in the gauge needle positioning relative to the current data distribution, not a fixed 0–100 scale.

This is similar to a trend chart, where the y-axis might auto-scale—e.g., showing a max of 10 even if the actual value only reaches 7.

• System-calculated gauges will reflect the data’s actual min/max range, and not necessarily a percentage scale.
• Out-of-the-box gauges (like those on the context page) are:
  • Designed for percentage-based metrics (CPU, memory, interface utilization).
  • Hard-coded to display from 0 to 100, regardless of the data range.

Recommendation :

• No action is required if the gauge is working as designed with dynamic scaling.
• If a fixed scale is required (e.g., always showing 0–100):
  • Review the metric configuration.
  • Modify the gauge settings to apply static min and max values, if supported.