The proliferation of computers in our society, ranging from simple PCs to traditional mainframes has been accompanied by a widespread use of networks, both local and wide area.
Networks provide the pathways by which computers share information and coordinate their tasks.
Implicit in the idea of this coordination is the metric of time. Just as events in our personal lives are controlled by time, so are events in networked computer systems. Events are initiated at predefined times. The measurement of events is based on measuring both event data parameters and the associated sample times. Timestamps so created uniquely identify a sample and can be used to correlate samples of different yet simultaneous events.