Patent ID: 7975187

Claim:
A method for measuring a customer impacting failure rate in a communication network, comprising: collecting a plurality of customer impacting network failure events, where the plurality of customer impacting network failure events comprises both hardware failure events and software failure events associated with a; computing a mean time between outage metric from the plurality of customer impacting network failure events, wherein the mean time between outage metric is expressed as: M ⁢ ⁢ T ⁢ ⁢ B ⁢ ⁢ O ⁢ ⁢ METRIC = N × T F where, T represents a time period, N represents a total number of access line cards in the communication network for the router, and F represents a total number of equivalent access line card failures during the time period T; and comparing the mean time between outage metric with a mean time between outage goal metric, wherein the mean time between outage goal metric is calculated in accordance with a predicted mean time between failure metric.