So, in summary: Your dropped packet counters are the ones to be looking at
as a measure of goodput, more than your utilization counters.
Indeed. Capacity upgrades are best gauged by drop rates; bit-rates without this context are largely useless. When you're only aware of the RX side though, in the absence of an equivalent to BECN, what's the best way to track this? Do any of the Ethernet OAM standards expose this data? Similarly, could anyone share experiences with transit link upgrades to accommodate bursts? In the past, any requests to transit providers have been answered w/ the need for significant increases to 95%ile commits. While this makes sense from a sales perspective, there's a strong (but insufficient) engineering argument against it.