In many organizations, the network is not as reliable. And yet, for today's knowledge workers, the network is just as important as electricity or the telephone. They rely the network for access to the critical applications that are used to serve customers and track operations. They rely on it to communicate via e-mail and to research material on the Internet. Similarly, senior executives have come to rely on the network to support any strategic business initiative or new application. In the knowledge era, the network needs to be in a constant state of readiness. How can you ensure that it is? By using performance management techniques --including the most prevalent, baselining.

What is Performance Management?

Performance management is the ongoing analysis of network capacity requirements that ensures sufficient network bandwidth is available to meet performance objectives. Ideally, performance management is predominantly forward-looking -- it takes into consideration trends in network utilization as well as upcoming changes in the application environment (using modeling tools to analyze the network impact of new applications).

What Performance Management is Not

It is important to remember that Performance Management is only one aspect of Network Management. Other necessary Network Management functions may include:

Baselining is used for performance management, service-level management and for aspects of fault management, but actual performance is impacted by how well the other aspects of network management are implemented.

Philip Carden is a managing consultant with Renaissance Worldwide, a international provider of IT consulting services. He is a recognized expert in network management and security and is a co-author of the book Internet Security for Windows NT. You can reach him at pcarden@rens.com.