Network performance management is for network capacity planning, providing usage based billing, understanding Quality of Service (QOS) of traffic, providing reports to customers/users to fulfill Service level Agreement (SLA), and for network admin to obtain additional information about the network.
Network Performance management consists of two components: 1) a set of functions that evaluates and reports on the behavior of networking equipment and the effectiveness of the network or network element; 2) a set of various subfunctions that includes gathering statistical information, maintaining and examining historical logs, determining system performance under natural and artificial conditions, and altering system modes of operation.
Basic Measurements:
- Bandwidth utilization
- Packets per second
- Packet delay
- Round trip Time and RTT variance
- Packet loss
- Reachability
- Circuit Performance
An ideal performance management solution must be platform independent and extensible as well as able to provide integrated, total network coverage. The ideal solution must allow network admin to monitor ongoing physical network performance, analyze its data to correlate end-to-end service performance, and finally, to take action based on a complete understanding of network behavior. Complete performance management must drill down through each layer of network technology. With an integrated view of deployed technology, network admin can recognize the impact of performance management on their users.
Related Terms: Network management, Fault management, Configuration management, Security management