The performance of end-to-end services and applications heavily depends on various network parameters such as bandwidth, delay, jitter, and packet loss. There are various SLA constraints for different types of end applications. For example, applications that involve large file exchange, such as file transfer applications (FTP, TFTP), are very sensitive to bandwidth and packet loss, while on the other hand, media applications such as voice and video traffic are very sensitive to delay and jitter.

Measuring the performance of an end application varies depending on the SLA constraints of the end application, and therefore we need to measure different network parameters.

In this chapter, we will learn how to measure these network parameters, how to check for network problems caused by them, and how to solve these when possible.