Patent ID: 7082463

Claim:
A network device configured for monitoring a level of network service provided by a service provider, comprising: a network interface; a processor coupled to the network interface and receiving information from the network interface; a computer-readable medium accessible by the processor and comprising one or more sequences of instructions which, when executed by the processor, cause the processor to carry out the steps of: receiving a schema that provides a configuration for monitoring a service level contract between the service provider and a particular customer, wherein the schema comprises: data defining one or more metric tests for monitoring the level of network service being provided to the particular customer by the service provider, each said metric test measuring a level of service of a particular type of network operation, and including a set of one or more threshold values that define one or more particular performance metrics for the particular type of network operation, and information defining a specific time range for when the one or more metric tests are to be performed; and distributing the one or more metric tests to one or more agents, wherein the one or more agents configure devices associated with the network to perform the one or more metric tests during the specific time range and receive result information from the devices performing the one or more metric tests, wherein each of the one or more metric tests is selected from the group consisting of ICMP metric test, UDP metric test, DNS metric test, HTTP metric test and VoIP metric test.