CEO's are judged by their company's profitability, long-term growth, efficiency, etc. Students are judged based on quizes, reports, mid-terms and finals. The economy is tracked by tracking individual sectors, quarter-to-quarter and year-over-year performance, unemployment, interest rates, etc. What metrics are used to measure networks and network operators? 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)? What systems/processes do you use to track all of this information, and associate it to overall business success? Thanks. Pete.
On Mon, 3 Feb 2003, Pete Kruckenberg wrote: > What systems/processes do you use to track all of this > information, and associate it to overall business success? I assume this was a rhetorical question, since you know as well as I do that all major telcos fly by the seat of their pants. -Bill
I can assure you that is absolutely false Woody. -ren At 08:54 PM 2/3/2003 -0800, Bill Woodcock wrote:
On Mon, 3 Feb 2003, Pete Kruckenberg wrote: > What systems/processes do you use to track all of this > information, and associate it to overall business success?
I assume this was a rhetorical question, since you know as well as I do that all major telcos fly by the seat of their pants.
-Bill
From: "ren" *top post corrected*
At 08:54 PM 2/3/2003 -0800, Bill Woodcock wrote:
On Mon, 3 Feb 2003, Pete Kruckenberg wrote: > What systems/processes do you use to track all of this > information, and associate it to overall business success?
Customers Happy + (Bean Counter Happy && Bean Counter != Crook) + Time = Overall Business Success
One shouldn't make the model too complex. Know your customers and what they want. Temper that with proper evaluation of cost (ie, don't run at a loss by giving customer bandwidth for free). This is no different than any other business, and I've yet to see a company with an SLA perform better than a company without an SLA that cared about their customers.
I assume this was a rhetorical question, since you know as well as I do that all major telcos fly by the seat of their pants.
-Bill Define major. Are you saying that Rural ILECs aren't major telcos?
I can assure you that is absolutely false Woody. -ren
Do you represent a major telco? If so, were you flying by the seat of your pants when you top posted? :) Everyone flies by the seat of their pants. If there was a single proven way, we wouldn't need nanog or have any of the issues that are prevelant today. -Jack
-----Original Message----- From: Jack Bates Sent: Tuesday, February 04, 2003 8:49 AM Subject: Re: Network Operations "Metrics"
Customers Happy + (Bean Counter Happy && Bean Counter != Crook) + Time = Overall Business Success
Now the $64M question is which NMS system will allow you to calculate that in RealTime? ;) -Jim P.
On Tue, 4 Feb 2003, Jim Popovitch wrote:
Now the $64M question is which NMS system will allow you to calculate that in RealTime? ;)
Honestly. We did it with Nagios. www.nagios.org It keeps the bean counters happy. And with good notes on the specific outages we can account for the down time and steps to prevent it in the future. Combination of working services and happy customers are the best you can do. Gerald
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
participants (7)
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Alan Hannan -
Bill Woodcock -
Gerald -
Jack Bates -
Jim Popovitch -
Pete Kruckenberg -
ren