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Cisco - Performance Management: Best Practices White Paper
Performance Management: Best Practices White
Paper
Document ID: 15115
Introduction
Background Information
Critical Success Factors
Indicators for Performance Management
Performance Management Process Flow
Develop a Network Management Concept of Operations
Measure Performance
Perform a Proactive Fault Analysis
Performance Management Indicators
Document the Network Management Business Objectives
Document the Service Level Agreements
Create a List of Variables for the Baseline
Review the Baseline and Trends Analyses
Document a Whatif Analysis Methodology
Document the Methodology used for Increasing Network Performance
Summary
Related Information
Introduction
Performance management involves optimization of network service response time and management of the
consistency and quality of individual and overall network services. The most important service is the need to
measure the user/application response time. For most users, response time is the critical performance success
factor. This variable shapes the perception of network success by both your users and application
administrators.
Background Information
Capacity planning is the process by which you determine requirements for future network resources in order
to prevent a performance or availability impact on businesscritical applications. In the area of capacity
planning, the network baseline (CPU, memory, buffers, in/out octets, etc.) can affect response time. Therefore,
keep in mind that performance problems often correlate with capacity. In networks, this is typically bandwidth
and data that must wait in queues before it can be transmitted through the network. In voice applications, this
wait time almost certainly impacts users because factors such as delay and jitter affect the quality of the voice
call.
Another major issue that complicates performance management is that although high network availability is
missioncritical for both large enterprise and service provider networks, the tendency is to seek shortterm
economic gains at the risk of (often unforeseen) higher costs in the long run. During every budget cycle,
network administrators and project implementation personnel struggle to find a balance between performance
and fast implementation. Further, network administrators face challenges that include rapid product
development in order to meet narrow market windows, complex technologies, business consolidation,
competing markets, unscheduled downtime, lack of expertise, and often insufficient tools.
Cisco Performance Management: Best Practices White Paper In light of these challenges, how does performance fit within the network management framework? The
primary function of an ideal network management system is to optimize the operational capabilities of a
network. Once you accept this as the ultimate goal for network management, then the focus of network
management is to keep network operation at peak performance.
An ideal network management system includes these principle operations:
Informs the operator of impending performance deterioration.

Provides easy alternative routing and workarounds when performance deterioration or failure takes
place.

Provides the tools to pinpoint causes of performance deterioration or failure.

Serves as the main station for network resiliency and survivability.

Communicates performance in real time.

Based on this definition for an ideal system, performance management becomes essential to network
management. These performance management issues are critical:
User performance

Application performance

Capacity planning

Proactive fault management

It is important to note that with newer applications like voice and video, performance is the key variable to
success and if you cannot achieve consistent performance, the service is considered of low value and fails. In
other cases, users simply suffer from variable performance with intermittent application timeouts that degrade
productivity and user satisfaction.
This document details the most critical performance management issues, which include critical success
factors, key performance indicators, and a highlevel process map for performance management. It also
discusses the concepts of availability, response time, accuracy, utilization, and capacity planning and includes
a short discussion on the role of proactive fault analysis within performance management and the ideal
network management system.
Critical Success Factors
Critical success factors identify the requirements for implementation best practices. In order to qualify as a
critical success factor, a process or procedure must improve availability or the absence of the procedure must
decrease availability. In addition, the critical success factor should be measurable so that the organization can
determine the extent of their success.
Note:
See Performance Management Indicators for detailed information.
These are the critical success factors for performance management:
Gather a baseline for both network and application data.

Perform a whatif analysis on your network and applications.

Perform exception reporting for capacity issues.

Determine the network management overhead for all proposed or potential network management
services.

Analyze the capacity information.

Periodically review capacity information for both network and applications, as well as baseline and
exception.

Cisco Performance Management: Best Practices White Paper Have upgrade or tuning procedures set up to handle capacity issues on both a reactive and longterm
basis.

Indicators for Performance Management
Performance indicators provide the mechanism by which an organization can measure critical success factors.
Performance indicators for performance planning include:
Document the network management business objectives. This could be a formal concept of operations
for network management or a less formal statement of required features and objectives.

Create detailed and measurable service level objectives.

Provide documentation of the service level agreements with charts or graphs that show the success or
failure of how these agreements are met over time.

Collect a list of the variables for the baseline, such as polling interval, network management overhead
incurred, possible trigger thresholds, whether the variable is used as a trigger for a trap, and trending
analysis used against each variable.

Have a periodic meeting that reviews the analysis of the baseline and trends.

Have a whatif analysis methodology documented. This should include modeling and verification
where applicable.

When thresholds are exceed, develop documentation on the methodology used to increase network
resources. One item to document is the time line required to put in additional WAN bandwidth and a
cost table.

Performance Management Process Flow
These steps provide a highlevel process flow for performance management:
Develop a Network Management Concept of Operations
Define the Required Features: Services, Scalability and Availability Objectives
a.
Define Availability and Network Management Objectives
b.
Define Performance SLAs and Metrics
c.
Define SLAs
d.
1.
Measure Performance
Gather Network Baseline Data
a.
Measure Availability
b.
Measure Response Time
c.
Measure Accuracy
d.
Measure Utilization
e.
Capacity Planning
f.
2.
Perform a Proactive Fault Analysis
Use Thresholds for Proactive Fault Management
a.
Network Management Implementation
b.
Network Operation Metrics
c.
3.
Develop a Network Management Concept of Operations
Before you define the detailed performance and capacity variables for a network, you must look at the overall
concept of operation for network management within your organization. When you define this overall
Cisco Performance Management: Best Practices White Paper concept, it provides a business foundation upon which you can build precise definitions of the features desired
in you network. If you fail to develop an operational concept for network management, it can lead to a lack of
goals or goals that constantly shift due to customer demands.
You normally produce the network management concept of operations as the first step in the system definition
phase of the network management program. The purpose is to describe the overall desired system
characteristics from an operational standpoint. The use of this document is to coordinate the overall business
(nonquantitative) goals of network operations, engineering, design, other business units, and the end users.
The focus of this document is to form the long range operational planning activities for network management
and operation. It also provides guidance for the development of all subsequent definition documentation, such
as service level agreements. This initial set of definitions obviously cannot focus too narrowly on the
management of specific network problems, but on those items that emphasize importance to the overall
organization and in relationship to the costs that must be managed as well. Some objectives are:
Identify those characteristics essential to efficient use of the network infrastructure.

Identify the services/applications that the network supports.

Initiate endtoend service management.

Initiate performancebased metrics to improve overall service.

Collect and distribute performance management information.

Support strategic evaluation of the network with feedback from users.

In other words, the network management concept of operations should focu