The Metrics Case
Essay Preview: The Metrics Case
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In todays world, network management is an important duty and responsibility of all network administrators and similar employees. Currently, there are various metrics that are used in determining network effectiveness and efficiency in meeting organizational goals. For this assignment, I will talk about some of the metrics that are used by network management personnel. The metrics I will speak about are mean opinion score (MOS), availability, mean time between failures (MTBF) and mean time to repair (MTTR).
The mean opinion score is typically used to measure the quality of voice calls. Although this metric can be used for various measurements, it mainly focuses on rating the sound quality of voice or video calls. The first function that this metric performs is to evaluate the voice calls by assigning a certain number to various parts of the call. The time it takes until a user hears a dial tone when picking up the phone is one example of a part of the voice calls being evaluated. There is also: end-to-end voice delay, call completion rate, busy hour call attempts, the length of time that it takes until a ring tone is received after a call is dialed, availability of the service during peak hours and during off hours, time to provision new user and number of provisioning operations. Once all of these parts of a voice call have been evaluated, the mean opinion score can let a network administrator or manager know if calls are being sent through the network in an efficient manner.
Reliability of network services also needs to be assessed by a network manager. The availability for any part of service running within the network is an important factor. The percentage of time during which a service is functioning properly is the metric for availability. There are two different types of availability that must be distinguished when determining this metric. The first is; what is the percentage of availability for any part of service running within the network as a whole. The second is; what is the percentage of availability for any part of service running within the network when scheduled maintenance is put into the equation. The second aspect of this metric is more relevant than the first. That is because the second aspect deals with capturing unavailability that comes as a negative surprise.
The mean time between failures is a classical measure of how reliable a network or service running within the network is. It gives an indication of how much a service or piece of hardware becomes unavailable regardless of the duration of the failure. A service can be available during peak hours and as much as possible. However, when a service has brief instances where it does not perform as expected, it is not considered reliable. With reliability, a network manager is basically targeting the availability metric, but in a more expansive method.
The mean time to repair metric is another classical measure. It indicates how long