When Will 'Net Performance Get Up To Speed?(Internet)(Internet/Web/Online Service Information)

Measurement and monitoring tools are available, as are caching and compression. Is it enough?

What does Internet performance mean to you? How do you measure it? Why does it matter? How do you improve it? Network managers dealing with Internet performance issues probably believe that it is easier to explain the meaning of life than to answer those questions. That's because Internet performance monitoring can take many forms, and "performance" can mean something very different to people even within a single corporation.

If your only interest is the generic state of the Internet, there are several public websites that anyone can visit to check the performance of public routers and peering points. For example, www.internettrafficreport.com has up-to-the-minute and trend information about Internet performance around the world. The site takes you down to the router level--you can click on a specific router and get information like latency and percent of packets lost.

Keynote, an Internet performance measurement company, offers a variety of statistics through its site www.keynote.com., including a snapshot of the previous hour's average Internet latency performance between the major backbone providers. Keynote also offers a weekly average index of performance for 40 consumer sites and 40 business sites (for more on Keynote, see this issue, pp. 12-14).

Similarly, if you're interested in average call-failure rates, Web page download times and DNS look-up times, Visual Networks (www.visualnetworks.com), using benchmark methods and tools developed by recently-acquired Inverse Network Technology, publishes quarterly summaries of such parameters. Network managers who want more detailed information can subscribe to the company's Visual Internet Benchmark services.

Other approaches are available for network managers who need assurances that they are getting adequate performance to meet their corporation's needs. In fact, when it comes to Internet performance, a growing number of network managers rely on service level agreements from providers.

SLAs--Good News, Bad News

Interestingly, however, most analysts agree that the quality and/or availability of Internet performance SLAs aren't decisive factors when selecting a service provider--at least not yet. This is in contrast to the …