Patent ID: 7870243

Claim:
A method of monitoring network performance where performance requirements are already established in order to generate anticipatory alerts, comprising: monitoring, by a computer, a performance-defining metric on a recurring basis to obtain samples of the metric; determining a trend in actual service based on the obtained samples of the metric using linear regression, further comprising: analyzing a set of samples obtained over a predetermined sampling interval to determine whether the analyzed set satisfies predetermined reliability criteria, the predetermined reliability criteria requiring a predetermined, minimum number of samples in the set; and if the analyzed set of samples satisfies the predetermined reliability criteria, then using the set of samples in the linear regression, further comprising: determining a standard deviation and a mean of the ones of the obtained sets of samples, determining a ratio of the standard deviation and the mean of the ones of the obtained sets of samples, generating a prediction, using the ones of the obtained sets of samples in which the ratio of the standard deviation and the mean does not exceed a predefined threshold, of a time at which the metric will cross a defined threshold if the current trend continues; and generating an anticipatory alert if the time at which the metric will cross the defined threshold is less than a predetermined time from a current time at which the prediction is made; and canceling a previously generated alert if a subsequently-generated mathematical representation of the current trend predicts that the time when the network performance metric will exceed the defined threshold is not within a predetermined time window measured from a current time at which the subsequent prediction is made.