What metrics are used to measure networks and network operators?
Peering and Transit Cost Peering and Transit Cost / bit Revenue Revenue/bit Change Management Practices and Successes Outages Ave Uptime/Device by Type Ave # Trouble Tickets / Time Customer Turnups/Month Customer Call hold times and call lengths Peering BW Peering Utilization Average Backbone Circuit Utilization Peak Backbone Circuit Utilization [maybe P95 of circuits, or top 20 busy] Packet Loss and Latency within network Packet Loss and Latency outside of network on Internet Devices managed # of employees required Ave # of employees / device Capex $$ / POP Capex $$ / bit or bps Traffic/Pop dialup holdtimes Ave Packet Size It's interesting to note that two schools of thought exist on defining the denominator in many cases - rate (bps) and volume (TB/month).
What "micro" measurements (the equivalent of tracking travel expenses or cost-of-sales to ensure overall profitability) are used to ensure good macro-level (up-time, network reliability, application performance, happy customers)?
Specific instances of some of above.
What systems/processes do you use to track all of this information, and associate it to overall business success?
Although folks would love to throw money at vendor XYZ to produce SAS-like reports w/ a big dial, I don't believe such a tool exists. At the end of the day, the formula about making a profit without too many upset customers and no financial chicanery is the simplest. In terms of greater geo-telco-politics, a particular engineering group or operations group may pick out 2-10 metrics above and use those to justify certain things. The vast majority of the metrics above can be gotten from simple ping scripts and snmp query scripts stuffing data into databases, and running DB reports. A trouble ticket system such as remedy or RT2 or others can also serve as a workflow system and provide useful statistics. "There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics." - Benjamin Disraeli -a