Patent ID: 7523181

Claim:
A process for determining server performance metrics in a network, comprising: providing a service metric probe resident on a server for determining service availability and metric measurements of types of services provided by a content delivery server; providing a latency probe resident on a server for determining latency values for various content delivery servers within the network; wherein the service metric probe consults a configuration file containing each DNS name in an area associated with the service metric probe and any set(s) of services associated with each DNS name; wherein the set(s) of services include any of: HTTP, HTTPS, FTP, streaming media, or generic SNMP; wherein the latency probe calculates a latency value from a location of the latency probe to a client's location; and wherein, for a given DNS name, a DNS server uses updates to the latency values and updates to the service availability and metric measurements to determine a content delivery server to return.