Measurement and Management of Internet Services

It is increasingly important for Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to monitor their systems to detect problems in advance of customer complaints. Accurate, yet rapid, diagnosis of detected problems is essential for minimizing customer-perceived service downtimes. Such requirements warrant a new generation of technologies for service quality measurement and problem diagnosis. End-to-end performance management requires analysis of the ISP network, servers, applications, and infrastructure components. This paper proposes a methodology and measurement instrumentation for managing ISP service quality. This paper presents case studies that demonstrate the use of performance measurements for problem detection and isolation. The results, which highlight the practical utility of the measurements, have been obtained from real-world measurements in commercial ISP environments and the general Internet.