Step 8 — What the dashboard is telling you

Throughput panel (Overview). Aggregate bits/second in and out through the BNG's dataplane, sampled every 5 seconds. The number matches what CPESIM's simulator page reports because both read from the same VPP counter.

Session state pills (Overview + Subscribers). Every subscriber card has a color: green for AUTHENTICATED and passing traffic, yellow for CAPTIVE_PENDING, red for IDLE or EXPIRED. Real customer traffic looks like this too — most subscribers green, a small captive-portal minority yellow.

QoS meter (per plan). For the Bronze plan you'll see three bands: green (within-CIR traffic, guaranteed), yellow (CIR-to-PIR burst), red (over-PIR, dropped by the QoS meter). At the 20/25 Mbps CIR/PIR settings and 8 authenticated subscribers, aggregate downstream sits around 200 Mbps — well within what a real BNG's control plane can handle, and with plenty of headroom to scale up.

Events (Dashboard → Events). Every simulated CPE's onboarding lands here as an event stream: subscriber_bound, subscriber_authenticated, subscriber_traffic_first. Same timeline you'd see on a real customer, just at simulator-scale speed.

Prometheus metrics (Advanced). The /metrics endpoint is scraped every 15 seconds by the built-in Prometheus instance. If you want to graph any counter yourself, http://localhost:9090/ from your host browser hits the raw Prometheus UI.