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For most operational networks, monitor reachability and service availability, latency, packet loss, jitter, and throughput or available bandwidth on important paths. Add utilization, interface errors and drops, routing, DNS, and HTTP/API checks when they help explain user impact, capacity, or service objectives. There is no universal mandated list: choose measures that connect what users experience to what the network is doing.
Start with the measures that show whether users can connect
Reachability and availability
Check whether important endpoints, paths, and services can be reached. A device or link reporting “up” does not prove that a user can resolve a name or reach an application. For services governed by an SLO, measure how much time or how many packets meet the configured performance thresholds. Match the measurement points and interval to the objective. The IETF’s guidance on network telemetry describes visibility as essential to operating a network: RFC 9232.
Latency
Track one-way delay when synchronized, path-aware measurement is available. Endpoint probes commonly report round-trip time (RTT), which captures the trip in both directions but cannot show which direction caused a delay. Partial-path measurements can help narrow down where a delay is occurring. The IETF’s ALTO performance metrics are generally unidirectional, with round-trip delay as an exception; their coarse-grained guidance is not a complete methodology for every operational use case.
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Packet loss
Measure loss by direction and at useful network points where possible. TCP sequence gaps, retransmissions, and selective acknowledgements can help identify loss, but packet reordering can be mistaken for loss if the measurements are interpreted carelessly. Direction matters: a one-sided figure may miss problems on the return path.
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Jitter or delay variation
Monitor changes in packet delay, particularly for voice and other interactive workloads. Variation can disrupt an experience even when average latency looks acceptable.
Throughput and bandwidth
Keep these related but distinct values separate:
- Nominal or maximum capacity: the link’s stated or configured upper capacity.
- Available or residual bandwidth: the headroom remaining on a path.
- Achieved throughput: the transfer rate an application or TCP connection actually realizes.
Capacity helps answer what a link can carry; available bandwidth helps assess headroom; achieved throughput shows the result for observed traffic. The IETF’s ALTO metrics guidance discusses these as different performance measures.
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Add device and path metrics to diagnose causes
Utilization, errors, and drops
Track interface rates and utilization alongside discards and errors. Utilization trends help with capacity planning; short-lived spikes, errors, or drops can help diagnose congestion or faulty links and devices. The IETF’s network telemetry framework describes telemetry use for both long-term planning and near-term fault or anomaly detection.
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Routing and application-facing checks
Where relevant to the service, monitor path changes and BGP reachability, DNS query time and resolution errors, and HTTP/API responsiveness. These checks catch failures that link-status counters cannot: a route may change, name resolution may fail, or an application may stop responding while an interface remains up. Vendor guidance from Kentik and Cisco ThousandEyes also groups monitoring across experience, traffic or capacity, network, routing, voice, and DNS dimensions.
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Operational response
Track incident detection and repair times, alert quality, and SLO/SLA compliance if you need to know whether monitoring is supporting reliable operations—not just collecting counters. These indicators help assess whether alerts surface meaningful problems and whether teams respond effectively.
Choose measurements that fit the service and the monitoring method
Cover experience, path behavior, and device health
Compare coverage across three connected views: the service experience, traffic and path behavior, and device or interface health. A useful set lets an operator correlate a user-visible symptom with plausible network causes instead of presenting isolated counters.
Record where and in which direction each value is measured
Document the measurement points and direction. A measurement from one endpoint or one side of a link is not automatically representative of the reverse path or the whole service.
Preserve distributions and threshold violations when they matter
Averages can hide brief bursts or a small set of badly affected packets. For tail experience and SLO compliance, retain useful percentiles, distributions, counts of packets violating thresholds, or counts over defined intervals. RFC 9544 explains the use of interval and packet counts. It gives an illustrative tiered latency SLO: no more than 30 ms for any packet, 25 ms for 99.999% of packets, and 20 ms for 99% of packets. These are example objective values, not universal thresholds.
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Choose active probes, passive telemetry, or both
Active probes test whether a selected destination, path, or service responds from a chosen vantage point. Passive traffic and device telemetry show behavior on the observed network elements and actual traffic. They answer different questions, so use the method that matches the goal. For broad telemetry collection, tune sampling and collect more detail when an incident or critical trend justifies the added overhead.
Set thresholds from service objectives
Base thresholds on the service’s SLO or SLA, measurement point, and time unit. RFC 9544 explicitly leaves threshold selection outside its scope. A latency, loss, jitter, or utilization number that works for one service is not automatically suitable for another. A useful measurement definition identifies its name, description, method, units, measurement points, and timing.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.Protect sensitive telemetry
Telemetry can expose sensitive or identifying information. RFC 9232 warns that large-scale collection creates privacy risks and says its framework must not be applied to generating, exporting, collecting, analyzing, or retaining individual-user data or data that can identify end users or characterize their behavior without consent. Limit collection and retention to what your operational purpose requires.
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