Evaluation of network condition

摘要

Information received from disparate monitors 200-202 concurrently measuring a property of a resource 240 in network 24 is compared in a reliability computation engine 22. Active probe 200 actively polls live data related to performance, passive monitor 201 acts on live data without polling and estimation monitor 202 derives estimated network performance from modeling. Preferably the active probe 200 is selected as the reference measurement. A metric of the degree of similarity between the measurements is computed and a measure of reliability is determined. The difference values may be weighted according to consistency with previous measurements. The reliability information may be used by a provisioning engine 28 to select or reject individual resources for use in meeting service requirements on the basis of the reliability of the reports of their performance, as well as the reported performance itself. Monitors identified as unreliable can also be reported to a fault diagnosis function 27.