ricep5
Premium
join:2000-08-07
Jacksonville, FL
 ·AT&T Southeast
 ·AT&T CallVantage
·VoicePulse
 ·Comcast Formerly ..
| All tools are limited
All tools have limitations in what they report, especially "in band" tools such as the ones promoted here. They have no way to discern if the issue being reported is being caused by the system or itself. The suggestion to look at trends over multiple sites and multiple days was excellent, as these tools do detect long term trends very well.
Short term network tools like Pingplotter (for example) are only good at showing ping latency over a particular route. If the preferred route changes due to congestion, network maintenance, router rule changes at a peer, the data can become less meaningful. This is why engineers at ISP's don't give these alot of salt as there is typically no service logic to aggregate the information from all of these one off sources to make a conclusive determination of what the problem is.
Good NMS tools use out of band devices to measure the quality of the network services being provided, but can only measure across the networks the vendor owns. Companies like Keynote Systems have made efforts to measure and calculate wholesale network latency from multiple locales nationally. But has value only when one particular network in the path is always showing a problem that is measureable.
Asking for commercial grade network monitoring and reporting from your ISP on what is essentially a residential service is a little over the top. However all the carriers I have worked with on commercial implementations have always been able to provide NMS reports except for basic unmanaged T-1 service. |
