Walter White
Blank University
NETW420
Professor Teague
Week 7 paper
4/22/13

There are many metrics used in network management that can be broke down into three sections including classic, cost, and revenue for short. The classic metrics consist of availability which is the percentage of time during which a service is functioning properly. Availability is broken into two aspects, as a whole and availability that factors maintenance, where maintenance is more effective because it only captures unavailability caused by a negative surprise. MTBF or Mean Time Between Failures is a measure of reliability its job is to give an indication of how often a service or device becomes unavailable, but not so much the length of the outage. MTTR also known as Mean Time To Repair provides the length of time it takes for services that are impacted by failures to be restored. Total cost of operations can be normalized over a different group of metrics, such as, the number of devices and the operational cost per device. Devices and differ in nature and scale so this metric is not always meaningful unless dealing with homogeneous environments. The number of ports is another metric that provides a more level playing field and allows operational cost to be compared across different types of equipment. An example of number of service instances could be the operational cost per voice extension. The number of end users would be the operational cost per employee in an enterprise. There are also metrics that concern the network management impact on revenue, one problem with this is that the amount of revenue can really be attributed to management is not always clear. Customer loss rate from dissatisfaction with the service level focuses on aspects that might be attributable to poor management of the service. Mean time to fill orders is the time from service order to service activation. Average size of customer order backlog, the smaller the backlog size the better. Customer defections from slow order fulfillment are where customers cancel services before they were activated. Total penalties for service level agreement violations reflect total lost revenue. And the ration between penalties and service revenue, reflecting the portion of revenue that was lost from violated SLAs.

Bibliography
Clemm, A. (2007). network management fundamentals. indianapolis: cisco press.