OSS Knowledge Base --Beta release --

Service quality can be defined as “the collective effect of service performances which determine the degree of satisfaction of a user of the service” (ITU E.800). In other words, quality is the customer’s perception of a delivered service. By service-quality management, we refer to the monitoring and maintenance of end-to-end services for specific customers or classes of customers.

Service-level management is the monitoring and management of the quality of service(QoS) of an entity's key performance indicators(KPIs). A service-level agreement enables an organization to be assured of a defined amount of stability, reliability, and performance for the provided IT infrastructure. A service-level agreement may complement or be part of policy-based service-level management. Service-level management means that potential problems can be identified (such as gradual performance degradation) and alerts can be created, thereby minimizing the risk of downtime.
Service-level management provides a "comfort zone" about the quality of a given infrastructure solution.

In network management, fault management is the set of functions that detect, isolate, and correct malfunctions in a telecommunications network, compensate for environmental changes, and include maintaining and examining error logs, accepting and acting on error detection notifications, tracing and identifying faults, carrying out sequences of diagnostics tests, correcting faults, reporting error conditions, and localizing and tracing faults by examining and manipulating database information.

Network performance management consists of measuring, modeling, planning, and optimizing networks to ensure that they carry traffic with the speed, reliability, and capacity that is appropriate for the nature of the application and the cost constraints of the organization. Different applications warrant different blends of capacity, latency, and reliability.

Root cause analysis (RCA) is a class of problem solving methods aimed at identifying the root causes of problems or events. The practice of RCA is predicated on the belief that problems are best solved by attempting to correct or eliminate root causes, as opposed to merely addressing the immediately obvious symptoms. By directing corrective measures at root causes, it is hoped that the likelihood of problem recurrence will be minimized. However, it is recognized that complete prevention of recurrence by a single intervention is not always possible. Thus, RCA is often considered to be an iterative process, and is frequently viewed as a tool of continuous improvement.

IP SLA is an acronym for IP Service Level Agreements.  IP SLA was formerly called Service Assurance Agent (SAA).  IP SLA is an embedded, synthetic performance-monitoring tool to measure service performance from the network perspective.  Because IP SLA is embedded in Cisco IOS Software, it is platform-independent for all Cisco routers and switches running Cisco IOS Software.