Performance and Fault Management

Basic Statistical Measures and Applications

This section defines some basic statistical values and gives simple examples of how they apply to network management. The following indexes are considered:

• Average

• Mode

• Median

• Range

• Variance

• Standard deviation

Before defining and looking at examples of these values, a bit of background is in order.

At its most basic, data analysis provides us with ways of organizing information. Descriptive measures such as averages and standard deviations—combined with graphing techniques such as histograms, pie charts, and line diagrams—can provide us with an overall picture of the data characteristics.

Because data from a network represents random samples, you can form confidence intervals to make inferences about the ...