Network Performance Management

PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT IN NETWORKED SITUATIONS

On March 16, 2000, Amazon.com (AMZN), one of the leading E-commerce sites on the Internet, crashed at 2:08 p.m., Pacific Coast Time. The company has one of the most technically advanced performance management system in the world, and has spent more than $400 million building and maintaining its systems.

According to the flash news release from Wired, "The technical problem was internal and was not a denial-of-service attack, according to Amazon spokeswoman Patty Smith. From 2:08 p.m. to 3:09 p.m. PST, Amazon users were met with a message informing them that æour store is closed temporarily'" (Couzin, 2000, Online).

The company wouldn't disclose the financial details of the loss, but some analysts suggested that the outage could have cost upwards of $500,000 in missed revenues. What happened?

"Amazon engineers didn't know what caused the crash, but we're working to find out. Although she acknowledged that the company is concerned about such system failures and the loss of business that inevitably accompanies them,[the spokesman] also pointed out that a site the size of Amazon is bound to hiccup now and then" (Couzin, 2000, Online).

onitoring, control and closeout of projects ("Our Services" Online). The Importance of Network Performance Management Typically companies make a distinction between what technologies (software, switches, servers, DB operands) accomplish (their results) and how effectively the technology achieves those results (their behaviors). Organizations attempt to manage the "what" side of the performance coin through a goal-setting or Management by Objectives process. At the beginning of a performance period employees would set goals, say a 22 percent improvement in data processing, or a reduction in down or offline time by 4 percent. Managers would be involved in the goal setting in an effort to ensure that individual goals are aligned with the organization's. At the end of the performance period, the technology employees and the technology's performance against the goals is evaluated. The "how" side of performance was managed by creating a competency model that specifies the behaviors expected by the organization, or the processing and connectivity speeds and accuracies that are thought to be needed by effective technology. So a performance period, therefore, has the following elements: * A goal to solve a problem * Personnel who wil