Patent ID: 8634311

Claim:
A method for measuring compliance with a service level agreement for communications, the method comprising: setting a committed information rate operable to avoid contention, wherein the committed information rate includes a user network interface committed information rate and a core committed information rate; measuring bandwidth utilization and performance metrics of communications paths of a network; determining there is frame loss on the network in response to the performance metrics; determining if the committed information rate is exceeded in response to the determined frame loss; determining that the frame loss is acceptable and the service level agreement is considered to be compliant in response to determining that the frame loss occurs and the user network interface committed information rate or the core committed information rate are exceeded, wherein the user network interface committed information rate is not exceeded when throughput has not reached a maximum threshold on either end of a user network interface pair; determining that a service is noncompliant with the service level agreement in response to determining the committed information rate has not been exceeded and there is frame loss on the network; and logging noncompliance of the service with the service level agreement.