What NPM measures
Latency: round-trip time — how long data takes for a one-way or round-trip journey. Throughput: bandwidth utilization and how much actual traffic the link carries. Loss and jitter: dropped packets and latency variation that degrade real-time workloads. Path and interface: per-hop behavior, interface errors, and optical signal levels.
"Up" is not "Healthy"
A switch can respond to every ping while a degrading optical module quietly drives up the attenuation on a link. Key advantages: trend analysis rather than just up/down, baselines for latency/loss/throughput, optical-attenuation alerts, correlation with hardware and storage, performance tied to business services.
FAQ
NPM is continuous measurement of network transport quality — not only whether devices are reachable but how fast and how reliably data moves across them. Network monitoring vs NPM: network monitoring usually means availability; NPM is about quality. NPM tracks: latency, throughput/bandwidth utilization, packet loss, jitter, interface errors.