THE PLATFORM
PathMetrics is one lightweight collector — the Anchor — feeding a formula stack that turns per-hop, bidirectional network telemetry into nine scores your NOC, your SRE lead, and your CFO can all read the same way.
▶ How PathMetrics Works?
DEPTH
This is the section for the people who will actually push back on our claims — and we want them to. Here's exactly what's under the hood.
PROBING
ICMP → UDP → TCP-SYN fallback per hop. Paris-traceroute-consistent flow-key pinning means ECMP hashing returns the real path — no phantom hops, no guessing which of sixteen load-balanced routes your packet actually took.
MTU
DF-bit / ICMP Fragmentation-Needed probing produces the MTU step diagram — exactly where a tunnel or an overlay quietly shrinks your effective packet size, long before an app team notices dropped payloads.
CONGESTION
ΔRTT = median(RTTₕ) − median(RTTₕ₋₁), combined with RTT standard deviation to name the exact link where a queue is building — not just “the network is slow.”
BIDIRECTIONAL
Anchor-to-anchor mode runs forward and reverse measurement at the same time, rendered as side-by-side dual graphs with asymmetry deltas called out explicitly.
INTEGRITY
Routing-loop detection, blackhole detection, and ECMP variance scoring run on every measured path, every cycle — not sampled, not spot-checked.
FUSION
iMon synthetic transaction monitoring ships fused with iPath — when a synthetic test fails, the exact hop causing it arrives with the alert, not in a separate tool.
THE IP
Datadog, Dynatrace, and most “health score” tools give you a number with no formula behind it. PathMetrics ships the formula in the product — and, since August 2026, on the bill.
| Metric | Name | Range | Tells you |
|---|---|---|---|
| PRI | Path Reliability Index | 0–100 | Composite end-to-end health of the forward path |
| PSS | Path Stability Score | 0–100 | How much path metrics fluctuate between cycles |
| MRR | MTU Reliability Rating | 0–100 | Whether the path supports expected packet size without fragmentation |
| PCI | Path Congestion Index | 0–1 | Queue build-up, rolled up hop to path |
| TCI | Throughput Capacity Index | 0–1 | Effective pipe size — MTU × (1 − congestion) |
| ARI | Asymmetry Reliability Index | 0–100 | Forward-vs-reverse path quality difference |
| BSS | Bidirectional Stability Score | 0–100 | Whether forward and reverse are equally stable over time |
| TDC | Trust-Weighted Directional Confidence | 0–100 | Confidence in the measurement data itself |
| BPCI | Bidirectional Path Credibility Index | 0–1 | The master score for a bidirectional connection |
All nine roll up into FPHS — the Final Path Health Score, the one number an executive can read. Governed by a Critical Override: if a single dealbreaker metric (like MTU or reliability) hits Critical, FPHS goes Critical regardless of the rest. No mathematical illusions. Weightages, baselines, and thresholds are configurable per customer — the formula is published, not fixed to defaults that don't fit your network.
PATHIQ
PathiQ takes the nine metric streams and predicts what happens next — before your users feel it.
01
Translates reliability, stability, congestion, and asymmetry signals into a ranked, human-readable cause chain. “This hop, this direction, this reason” — not “something is wrong.”
02
A single probability that the overall bidirectional path will degrade, synthesized from ARI + BSS + TDC via BPCI.
03
Forward-looking PRI projection with confidence bounds, built on PRI history and PSS variance.
04
The likelihood a currently healthy path degrades in the next window — drift in PRI, rising PSS variance, increasing congestion.
05
Predicts where on the path congestion will form next, not just when — tracked at the specific hop, aggregated to PCI.
06
Learns normal-behavior envelopes across PRI / PSS / CI / MRR and directional metrics. Deviations are scored, not guessed.
07
Forecasts whether an application-level SLA is about to breach — before the breach shows up as a ticket.
08
Ranks every hop on a path by failure risk, so remediation starts at the most likely point of failure, not the first alert that fires.
09
Flags region- and location-correlated failure patterns across your Anchor fleet, not just single-path anomalies.
10
Correlates alerts across metrics and hops before they reach a human — engineered for roughly 60% fewer noise alerts than threshold-only monitoring.
11
Trend models across the raw signal set, feeding the forecasts above instead of sitting in a separate dashboard.
PathiQ ships 15 AI capabilities in total. Every one is included with every Anchor — AI is never a paid add-on.
CREDSCORE™
CredScore is a 0–100 credibility score attached to every PathiQ prediction, computed by comparing forecasts against actual outcomes. It's the reason PathMetrics can say “AI” to a skeptical audience without losing them.
→ Policy-driven automation gates: auto-remediate only when CredScore ≥ 90
→ Human-in-the-loop routing below your chosen threshold
→ Low scores automatically trigger model retraining
→ Transparent validation logs, engineered to support PCI-DSS / ISO 27001 review
An Anchor isn't just a collector. Every deployment ships with the operations and access-control layer an enterprise NOC actually needs to run it.
TICKETING
Built-in ticketing is FRT/SLA-aware and AI-prioritized — tickets carry the hop, the root cause, and the CredScore. ServiceNow integration is bidirectional and in production today; Jira Service Management, PagerDuty, and OpsGenie are available as scoped integrations.
CONVERSATIONAL
An NLP mobile/voice app that talks back — ask your observability data a question instead of opening a dashboard. Email notifications route per-user, per-priority alongside it.
ADMIN & APIS
Endpoint, Anchor, and org management from a single portal, with metric-profile administration and API keys for programmatic access. 12-month data retention on Professional, extended on Enterprise.
SSO & IDENTITY
Native login plus SSO — Microsoft Entra ID, Google Workspace (domain-restricted), SAML 2.0 for any IdP, LDAP/AD. One login page auto-routes users by email domain, with TOTP two-factor as standard.
PROVISIONING
Automatic user and group lifecycle sync from your IdP via SCIM 2.0. RBAC applies at the org level, the Portal (MSP) level, and down to per-menu CRUD / export / import permissions.
MSP & SECURITY
Delegated multi-organization access lets partners switch between every org they manage from one login. Lockout policy, IP allow-listing, password expiry, and a read-only audit log cover every grant, denial, and security action.
THE GUARANTEE
Every hop, every path — not a sampled subset.
A 1-minute interval costs the same as a 15-minute one.
The flagship capability, standard in every edition.
All 15 PathiQ capabilities, on every Anchor.
Unlimited, in every edition.
Built in, not bolted on with a separate line item.
If a competitor meters it, PathMetrics probably includes it.
THE PHILOSOPHY
Every score has a published formula. AI is foresight layered on top of deterministic ground truth — never a replacement for it.
“We show our math. Everyone else asks you to trust a black box.”