One of the key aspects of WAN governance is situation awareness: what is users' Quality of Experience (QoE)? What is the network performance? What are business and recreational applications that share the network? What is the network load? What is the peak hour in the day, peak day in the week, peak month in the year? Is it network, clients or servers that limit the application performance? All of this must be answered per application, per site, per business unit…
Like many if not all complex subjects that cannot be embraced easily and require progressive adjustments, a clear view of the situation is a major step for an optimized application delivery strategy in a well managed closed loop process that could be summarized like this:
- Decide about objectives
- Understand the current situation
- Compare situation to objectives
- Decide corrective or improvement actions
- Apply corrective or improvement actions
- Measure results and evaluate gaps with objectives
- And so on…
A compass is a relatively basic tool that provides one value: north (or south) pole direction. A chronometer is a (less basic) device that provides one value: the GMT time. Both in hand, modern navigators managed to sail Mare Incognita all over the globe, while previous explorers that could not benefit from this technology had to stay in view of the coast line.
Like explorers, organizations that decide to apply WAN governance need simple and fundamental data that could be easily compared to goals. Not awfully long lists of parameters, figures, values, graphs, tables, charts... that will generate more doubts and questions than clarity.
It seems that the necessary quality of such KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) are:
- Simplicity (typically a value on a well-known scale like 0 to 10, or a RAG - Red Amber Green - code)
- Relevance to the objectives
- As few of them as possible
- Ability to be easily obtained
We will provide later some examples of application performance KPIs, like MOS (Mean Opinion Score) for voice and video, AQS (Application Quality Score) and Apdex (Application Performance Index) for data applications.
A very fundamental aspect of KPIs to take into consideration (and that will also be discussed in posts to come) is that KPIs are not neutral:
- They reflect the strategy
- They affect the behavior of the monitored process
- They modify the process they are measuring ("Observer effect")
Would you sail like Odysseus and take ages to get home (well, be kept as Calypso's lover for seven years may seduce some of us…)? If not, you'd better to get compass and chronometers before leaving the harbor…
(note: a technical incident forced me to republish this post - sorry for those who already read it)
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