Monitoring essentially means gathering information from managed network items and calculating operation characteristics (indicators) for them. It is convenient to classify logically connected individual indicators together in metrics. Thus, each metric characterizes a particular aspect of monitored item's operation.
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For example, Network Host Availability metric can be defined as one included device online status (a boolean value indicating reachability of the host), response time (time from transmission to reception) and packet loss rate indicators available using ping. Additionally, a detailed traceroute data can be added to the metric. |
There are many types of network metrics that could be used to monitor networks. AggreGate Network Manager provides several pre-defined commonly used metrics. Moreover, AggreGate platform offers rich facilities to calculate other metrics if you need them.
There are two basic methods to calculating metrics for monitored item's behaviour:
| • | Current-value monitoring: item's characteristics are obtained for particular moments of time. |
| • | Statistical monitoring: one or several separate instant characteristics are accumulated and used to calculate an aggregated indicator. |
AggreGate supports both methods. Monitoring can be configured to periodically poll monitored objects and calculate individual indicators to obtain current values and store them. The stored historical data then can be aggregated to obtain statistical representation of the indicator.
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By pinging a network host we can get its availability status at particular instants of time. Configuring a device for periodical ping with history enabled produces enough information to calculate statistical availability, i.e. a proportion of time the device was in a functioning condition. This can be an aggregated value for some fixed time intervals or availability for overall monitoring period. |
Metrics and indicators are used by AggreGate Network Manager tools. First of all, availability indicators are used to present device and service statuses. These and other indicators are also used in various alerts, reports, charts, widgets.