Understanding the Quality of Monitoring for Network Management

The vitality and utility of a network is affected significantly by the network management system which is used to administer and monitor the network. However, models that can characterize how good a network management system are generally missing in the literature. In this paper, the authors introduce the concept of Quality of Monitoring (QoM), provide a mathematical formulation based on stochastic processes that can be used to model a network monitoring system and define QoM metrics based on this formulation. A formal analysis of the proposed framework along various metrics is provided, along with a case study of its application to network monitoring for MANET.