TABLE OF CONTENTS Communications services are becoming increasingly more complex and geographically dispersed. Local administrators and managers have only a limited view of the interactions between the many different platforms, subsystems and software. However, overall service to the end customer obviously needs all the components to perform and interwork smoothly. Therefore, all such systems need a responsible co-ordinating team to oversee the total technology and business machine, and to maintain a detailed check on the performance of the whole network as experienced by its users. Providing this co-ordinating team with a management view of performance, and all it entails, is difficult. Some of the issues and solutions, evolved over a number of years, are discussed below.
The graphs and data are for illustrative purposes only.
The importance of specifying performance requirements and including performance engineering techniques early in the life cycle of a product, that is, during the feasibility and design stages, is increasingly accepted and understood. It is also accepted practice to devote resources to performance engineering throughout the development and testing phases. However, less attention is generally given to monitoring, reporting, performance management and capacity planning during the in-life phase of the product. Application of these techniques provides an immediate, highly visible benefit in that they enable severe problems to be corrected as soon as they occur, and many potential problems to be identified and resolved before they actually occur. This requires information, but it is not sufficient simply to...
