Summary

Performance management involves the collection and reporting of performance-related data. This chapter described four areas of performance measurement:

• Availability

• Response Time/Latency

• Accuracy and Errors

• Utilization

Performance reporting is a hot area in network management as vendors help customers make sense of the distributed networks they must manage. Managers and engineers alike want to know how their investment performs and where congestion, bottlenecks, and faults occur.

A nice benefit of performance data collection is that the collected data is useful for more than simply reporting. One vital use of the data is thresholding, in which you set high and low water marks against collected data to alert you if there are problems or a problem has been corrected. The next chapter discusses thresholding.